for the football squad. Some of the town boys became street-car
conductors. The new railroad that was built into Jonesville about that
time was a bonanza for us. It was no uncommon thing, the summer of my
Sophomore year, to find a dozen muddy society leaders shoveling dirt in
a construction crew and singing that grand old hymn composed by Petey
Simmons, which ran as follows:

_I've a blister on me heel, and me beak's begun to peel;
I've an ache for every bone that's in me back.
I've a feeling I could eat rubber hose and call it sweet,
And me hands is warped from lugging bits of track._

_Oh, me closes they are tore, and me shoulders they are sore,
And I sometimes wish that I had died a 'borning';
And me eye is full of dirt, and there's gravel in me shirt,
But I'm going back to Siwash in the mor-r-r-r-r-r-r-rning._

One of our own boys is a division superintendent on one of the big
western roads to-day, and he caught the railroad microbe in the shovel
gang.

The boys got newspaper positions and clerked in the stores, and one or
two of them tooted cornets or other disturbances at summer-resort
hotels. One junior, during my time, aroused the envy of the whole
college by painting the steeple of the First Baptist Church during
vacation; and when he finished the job his class numerals were painted
in big letters on top of the ornamental knob that tipped the spire. At
least, so he announced, and no rival class had the nerve to investigate.

But the most popular road to prosperity during the summer was the
canvassing route. About the last of April various smooth young college
chaps from other schools would drift into Siwash and begin to sign up
agents for the summer. There were three favorite lines--books,
stereopticon slides and a patent combination desk, blackboard,
sewing-table, snow-shovel, trundle-bed and ironing-board--which was sold
in vast numbers at that time by students all over the country. All
through May the agents fished for victims. They signed them up with
contracts guaranteeing them back-breaking profits, and then instructed
them with great care in a variety of speeches. Speech No. 1,
introductory. Speech No. 2, to women. Speech No. 3, clinching talk for
waverers. Speech No. 4, to parents. Speech No. 5, rebuttal to argument
that victim already has enough reading matter. Speech No. 6, general
appeal to patriotism and love of progress. Then on Commencement day