Greece." So they made game of me with the help of
the Classics, giving poignancy to their jokes by polishing the tips with
classical allusions. While I was under the "delusion," they sung
snatches of Bruce's Address to his army; and when they came to the words

"Who so base as be a slave?--
Let him turn and flee,"

one of them ran a cane under the delusion and punched me with it,
keeping stroke to the music. This was little short of profaneness. They
asked me if the chair-maker's harnesses were probably made by free or
slave labor, alluding, unfeelingly, to a mistake which I made in a
recitation one day, when two of those very students had kept me talking
about slavery up to the very moment when the recitation-bell rang, so
that I had not looked at my lesson. There are men in my class, and
these were some of them, who, I am told, are plotting to prevent my
having the first appointment, to which they know that my marks at
recitation entitle me. But may I never be so prejudiced against those
who differ from me on the subject of slavery as to deny them credit for
things which they have fairly earned. I leave this to the avowed enemies
of human rights. For the cause of the slave, I must gain the first
appointment.

I alluded, just now, to my feelings at witnessing tricks played on the
Freshmen. Had the Sophomores asked my advice before they played those
tricks, I should have dissuaded them; but when they played them, with
such courage and enterprise, I stood before them with admiration. But
while I was under that quilt, I found that I did not admire the
Sophomores at all, any more than I did the Seniors who then had me in
their power.

The enemies of freedom, in College, had a great triumph the other
evening. One of them, in one of the Literary Societies, read an Original
Poem, the title of which was, "The Fly-time of Freedom." He spoke of
"our glorious summer of Liberty" being infested and pestered with noisy,
provoking things, which he characterized under the names of dor-bugs,
millers, and all those creatures which fly into the room when the lamp
is lighted; the swarms of black gnats which are about your head in the
woods; horse-flies which stick, and leave blood running; and
devil's-darning-needles. One brave man here, a great "friend of
freedom," who, they falsely say, loves to be persecuted, and longs for
martyrdom, and interprets everything that way, he described as a miller,
who seems to court death in the