not a girl
was engaged to some fellow back home. We didn't get impertinent enough
to ask. I think there ought to be a law compelling a girl who comes to
college engaged to some rising young merchant prince in the country
store back home to wear an engagement ring around her neck, where it can
be easily seen. More than once, a Siwash man who had been conservative
enough to worship the same girl right through his college course and who
had proposed to her on the last night of school, when the open season
for thou-beside-me talk began, has found that all the time some chap has
been writing her a letter a day and that she has only regarded the
Siwash man as a kind friend, and so on. Never will I forget when
Frankling got stung that way! Of course we didn't generally know when a
tragedy of this sort happened, but in his case he brought it on himself.
If he hadn't made a furry-eared songbird out of himself when Ole
Skjarsen drew his girl at the Senior class party--

You want to know about this girl lottery business, you say? Well, it's
plain that I shall have to begin right back at the beginning of the
Siwash social system and educate you a little at a time. Now this class
party drawing is an institution which has been handed down at Siwash
ever since the ancients went to school before the war. You see, at
Siwash, as at most colleges, there is the fraternity problem. The frat
men give parties to the sorority girls as often as the Dean of Women
will stand for it, and every one gets gorgeously acquainted and
extremely sociable. The non-fratters go to the Y. M. C. A. reception at
the beginning of each year and to the Commencement exercises, and that's
about all. Of course they pick up lots of friends among the non-sorority
girls; and I guess D. Cupid solders up about as many jobs among them as
he does among the others. But there isn't much chance for these two
tribes to mix. That was why the class lottery was invented. It has been
a custom at Siwash, ever since there has been a Siwash, for each class
to hold a party each year. Now class parties are held in order that pure
and perfect democracy may be promoted, and it is necessary to take
violent measures to shuffle up the people and get every one interested.
So they draw for partners. The class which is about to effervesce
socially holds a meeting. At this meeting the names of all the men are
put in one hat and the names of all the girls in another. Then two
judges of impregnab