the Dramatic Club. In fact, there's
no limit to what you can absorb from idle and vicious companions. In one
term alone I myself picked up banjo playing, pole vaulting, a little
Spanish, a bad case of mumps, and two flunks, simply by associating with
the Eta Bita Pie gang twenty-seven hours a day.

But nobody had to show Keg how to get jobs after his first experience.
He had a knack of scenting a soft financial snap a mile away to leeward,
and working his way through college was the least of his troubles. It
used to make me tired to see the nonchalance with which he would sleuth
up to a nice fat thing like a baseball season program, and put away a
couple of hundred with a single turn of the wrist and about four days'
hard soliciting among the long-suffering Jonesville merchants. I never
could do it myself. I had the popular desire to work my way through
school when I entered Siwash, and I pictured myself at the end of my
college career receiving my diploma in my toil-scarred fist, without
having had a cent from home. But pshaw! I was a joke. I mowed one lawn
in my Freshman year, after hunting for work for three weeks; and I lost
that engagement because the family decided the hired girl could do it
better. After that I gave up and took my checks from home like a little
man. In Siwash it is all right to get sent through school, and nobody
looks down on you for it. The boys who make their own way are very kind
and never taunt you if you have to lean on Pa. But all the same, you
feel a little bit disgraced. Why, I've seen a cotillon leader run all
the way home from a downtown store where he clerked after school hours,
in order to get into his society harness on time; and when the winner of
the Interstate Oratorical in my Freshman year had received his laurel
wreath and three times three times three times three from the crazy
student body, he excused himself and went off to the house where he
lived, to fill up the hard-coal heater and pump the water for the next
day's washing.

As I started to say, some time ago, Keg proved to be a positive genius
in nailing down jobs. He hadn't been with us three months until he had
presented his laundry route to one of the boys. He didn't have time to
attend to it. He had hauled down a chapel monitorship that paid his
tuition. He got his board and room from us for being steward, and how he
ever got the fancy eats he gave us out of four dollars per week per
appetite is an unsolved wonder.