bit. It held a special session that night and declared the
center, the two backs and the captain ineligible because they had not
prepared orations the spring before at the request of the rhetoric
professor. That was first blood for us. We chased the Normalites all
over the lot with a scrub team and Keg Rearick sat up nights the next
week writing the orations. The result was we got four fine new
dry-cleaned records for our four star players and the Faculty was so
pleased with their fine work on those orations that we could scarcely
live with it for a week.

That was only a skirmish, however. We knew very well that the sacred
cause of education would come right back at us and we decided to be
elsewhere when it struck its next blow for progress. We talked it all
over with Bost, the coach, and the result was that a week before the
Muggledorfer game, the last week in September, Bost gave out his line-up
for the season in chapel. There were a good many surprises in the
line-up to some of us. It seemed funny that Miller shouldn't make the
team out and that Ole Skjarsen should have been left off; but the best
of men will slump, as Bost explained, and he had picked the team that he
thought would do the most good for Siwash. It was a team that I wouldn't
have hired to chase a Shanghai rooster out of a garden patch, but the
blind and happy Faculty didn't stop to reason about its excellence. It
held a meeting the night before the Muggledorfer game and suspended nine
of the men for inattention to chapel, smoking cigarettes during vacation
and other high crimes. The whole school roared with indignation. Bost
appeared before the Faculty meeting and almost shook his fist in Prexy's
face. He told the Faculty that it was the greatest crime of the
nineteenth century; and the Faculty told him in very high-class language
to go chase himself. So Bost went sorrowfully out and put in the regular
team as substitutes. The next day we whipped Muggledorfer 80 to 0.

[Illustration: Our peculiar style of pushing a football right through
the thorax of the whole middle west
_Page 205_]

I think that would have discouraged the Faculty if it hadn't been for
Professor Sillcocks. Did I ever tell you about Professor Sillcocks? It's
a shame if I haven't, because every one is the better and nobler for
hearing about him. He was about a nickel's worth of near-man with
Persian-lamb whiskers and the disposition of a pint of modified milk.