re sewn
up and bandaged. I cannot help my preference for foot-ball, or
baseball, or rowing, or a cross-country run with the hounds, or grouse
or pheasant shooting, or the shooting of bigger game, or the driving of
four horses, or the handling of a boat in a breeze of wind, but the
"world is so full of a number of things" that he has more audacity than
I who proposes to weigh them all in the scales of his personal
experience, and then to mark them with their relative values.

First of all, it is to be remembered that these Schlaeger contests
between students are in no sense duels; a duel being the setting by
one man of his chance of life against another's chance, both with
deadly weapons in their hands. These contests with the Schlaeger at the
German universities, wrongly called duels, are so conducted that there
is no possibility of permanent or even very serious injury to the
combatants. The attendants who put them into their fighting harness,
the doctors who look after them during the contest and who care for
them afterward, are old hands at the game, and no mistakes are made.

There is no feeling of animosity between the swordsmen as a rule. They
are merely candidates for promotion in their own corps who meet
candidates from other corps, and prove their skill and courage auf die
Mensur, or fighting-ground.

When a youth joins a corps he chooses a counsellor and friend, a
Leibbursch, as he is called, from among the older men, whose special
care it is, to see to it that he behaves himself properly in his new
environment; he pledges himself to respect the traditions and
standards of the corps, and to keep himself worthy of respect among
his fellows, and among those whom he meets outside. A companionship
and guardianship not unlike this, used to exist in the Greek-letter
society to which I once belonged. He of course abides by the rules and
regulations of the order. It is a time of freedom in one sense, but it
is a freedom closely guarded, and there is rigid discipline here as in
practically all other departments of life in Germany.

The young students, or Fuechse, as they are called, are instructed in
the way they should go by the older students, or Burschen, whose
authority is absolute. This authority extends even to the people whom
they may know and consort with, either in the university or in the
town, and to all questions of personal behavior, debts, dissipation,
manners, and general bearing. In many of the corp