quite a little stretch of yarn
sock visible before the big tan shoes began. Ole had two acres of feet
and he polished his shoes himself, with great care. They were not so
large as an ordinary ballroom, but somehow he used them so skillfully
that they gave the effect of covering the entire space. Four times
around Ole's feet constituted a pretty fair encore at our dances; and
I've seen him pen up as many as three couples in a corner with them when
he got those feet tangled.

That was Ole's formal costume. But he didn't regard it with awe. Any one
could wear a dress suit. It seemed to him that a Senior party to which
he was to escort Miss Spencer was too important to pass airily off with
the same old suit. He had another card up his sleeve.

"Aye ent tal yu," he explained when we asked him anxiously what it was
he proposed to wear. "Yust vait. Aye ban de hull show, Aye tank. Yu
fallers yust put on your yumpin'-yack suits. Aye mak yu look lak torta
cent."

Of course we waited. We didn't have anything else to do. We worried a
little, but we had gotten used to Ole, anyway--and what was the
difference? It would be a little hard on Miss Spencer, but it would be
magnificently horrible to Frankling, who considered that a collar of the
wrong cut might endanger a man's whole future career. So we resigned
ourselves and attended to our own troubles.

The night of the party was a cold, clear January evening. There was snow
on the ground and it was packed hard on the sidewalks. This was nuts for
the oil-burners. They walked their girls to the hall. Four of the
reckless ones clubbed together and hired a big closed carriage affair
from the livery stable. It happened to be a pallbearers' carriage during
the daytime, but they didn't know the difference and the girls didn't
tell them; and what you don't know will never cause your poor old brain
to ache. We frat fellows blew our hard-worked allowances for varnished
cabs and thereby proved ourselves the biggest suckers in the bunch. To
this day I can't see why a girl who can dance all night, and can stroll
all afternoon of a winter's day, has to be hauled three blocks in a
two-horse rig every time she goes to a party. The money we spent on cabs
while I was at Siwash would have built a new stadium, painted every frat
house in town and endowed a chair of United States languages. But,
there!--I'm on my pet hobby again. How it did hurt to pay for those
hacks!

I got there late with my girl