le honesty draw out a name from each hat
simultaneously and read them to the class.

When I was at Siwash a class party was the most exciting event in
college. For uncertainty and breath-grabbing anxiety they made the
football games seem as tame as a church election. Of course everybody
can't be a Venus de Milo or an Apollo with a Beveled Ear, as Petey
Simmons used to call him. Every class has its middle-aged young ladies,
who are attending college to rest up from ten or fifteen years of
school-teaching, and its tall young agriculturalists with restless
Adam's apples, whose idea of being socially interesting is to sit all
evening in the same chair making a noise like one of those $7.78-suit
dummies. That's what made the class lotteries so interesting. The
plow-chasers drew the prettiest girls in the class and the most
accomplished fusser among the fellows usually drew a girl who would make
the manager of a beauty parlor utter a sad shriek and throw up his job.
Of course every one was bound in honor to take what came out of the hat.
Nobody flinched and nobody renigged, but there was a lot of suppressed
excitement and well-modulated regret.

I have been reasonably wicked since I left college. Once or twice I
have slapped down a silver dollar or thereabout and have watched the
little ball roll round and round a pocket that meant a wagon-load of
tainted tin for me; and once in a while I have placed five dollars on a
pony of uncertain ability and have watched him go from ninth to second
before he blew up. But I never got half the heart-ripping suspense out
of these pastimes that I did out of a certain few party drawings, when I
waited for my name to come out and wondered, while I looked across the
hall at the girl section, whether I was going to draw the one girl in
the world, any one of four or five mighty interesting runners-up, or the
fat little girl in the corner with ropy hair and the general look of a
person who had had a bright idea a few years before and had been
convalescing from it ever since.

Talk about excitement and consequences! Those drawings kept us on the
jump until the parties were pulled off. Generally the proud beauties who
had been drawn by the midnight-oil destroyers did not know them, and
some one had to steer the said destroyers around to be introduced. What
with dragging bashful young chaps out to call and then seeing that they
didn't freeze up below the ankles and get sick on the night of the
pa