ook most of my available cash, and left me little to
expend in treating my fellow students at the tavern or in enjoying
the more substantial culinary delights of the Boston hotels. Thus
though I made no shabby friends I acquired few genteel ones, and
I began to feel keenly the disadvantages of a lean purse. I was
elected into none of the clubs, nor did I receive any invitations
to the numerous balls given in Boston or even to those in Cambridge.
This piqued my pride, to be sure, but only intensified my resolution
to become a man of fashion on my own account. If my classmates
could get on without me I felt that I could get on without them,
and I resolutely declined to appreciate any social distinction that
might artificially exist between a man born in Salem and one born
in Lynn, although I now understand that such distinction exists,
at least so far as Boston society is concerned. Consequently as
time went on and I could achieve prominence in no other way, I
sought consolation for the social joys denied by my betters in
acquiring the reputation of a sport. I held myself coldly aloof
from the fashionable men of my class and devoted myself to a few
cronies who found themselves in much the same position as my own.
In a short time we became known as the fastest set in college, and
our escapades were by no means confined to Cambridge, but were
carried on with great impartiality in Boston and the neighboring
towns.

We organized a club, which we called the Cock and Spur, and had a
rat-pit and cock-fights in the cellar, on which occasions we invited
out young actors from the Boston Museum and Howard Athenaeum stock
companies. These in turn pressed us with invitations to similar
festivities of their own, and we thus became acquainted with the
half-world of the modern Athens, which was much worse for us, I
trow, than would have been the most desperate society of our college
contemporaries. There was a club of young actors that we used to
frequent, where light comedy sketches and scenes from famous plays
were given by the members, and in due time several of us were
admitted to membership. Of these I was one and learned to do a
turn very acceptably. On one occasion I took a small part upon
the Boston Museum stage to fill the place made vacant by the illness
of a regular member of the cast--an illness due in part to a carousal
at the Cock and Spur the night before, in which he had come out
second best.

We were a cleve