om out of it, don't you?"

"Of course I do," exclaimed Sam. "I feel as if I were walking on air
and rising into another plane of being."

"Well--ye-es--perhaps, but I didn't mean that exactly," answered
Cleary. "But somehow I feel more like hitting a fellow over the head
when I'm in uniform than when I'm not, don't you?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said Sam, "but I really think I do. Do you
think they'll hit us over the head?"

"There's no telling. There's Captain Clark of the first class and
Saunders of the third who are running the hazing just now, they say,
and they're pretty tough chaps."

"Is that Captain Clark with the squeaky voice?" asked Sam.

"Yes, he spoiled it taking tabasco sauce when he was hazed three years
ago. They say it took all the mucous membrane off his epiglottis."

There was silence for a time.

"Saunders is that fellow with the crooked nose, isn't he?" asked Sam.

"Yes; when they hazed him last year they made him stand with his nose
in the crack of a door until they came back, and they forgot they had
left him, and somebody shut the door on his nose by mistake. But he's
an awfully plucky chap. He just went on standing there as if nothing
had happened."

"Splendid, wasn't it?" cried Sam, beginning to see the heroic
possibilities of hazing. "Do you suppose that they have always
hazed here?"

"Yes, of course."

"And that General German and General Meriden and all the rest were
hazed here just like this?"

"Yes, to be sure."

Sam felt his spirits soaring again.

"Then I wouldn't miss it for anything," said he. "It has always been
done and by the greatest men, and it must be the right thing to do.
Just think of it. Meriden has walked up this very hill like you and me
to be hazed!" There was exultation in his tone.

"Well, I only hope Meriden looked forward to it with greater joy than I
do," said Cleary, with a dry laugh. "But here we are."

Before them under the ruined walls of the old redoubt called Fort Hut,
stood a small group of cadets, indistinctly lighted by several moving
dark-lanterns. While they were still twenty yards away, two men sprang
out from behind a tree, grasped them by the arms, tied their elbows
behind them, and, leading them off through the woods for a short
distance, bound them to a tree out of sight of the rest, and left them
there with strict injunctions not to move. It never entered into the
head of either of th