The Diary of a Freshman

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Flandrau Charles Macomb. The Diary of a Freshman

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Well, I 've learned a lot of things during the past week, that are n't advertised in the catalogue. If I 've neglected to make a note of them until now, it has been my misfortune, and not my fault.

We registered on Wednesday morning – Freshmen have to register the day before college really opens – and I confess I was a little disappointed at the informal way such an important act of one's life is done. In the first place, as you can drop in any time between nine A.M. and one P.M., you don't see the whole class together. Then the room we registered in might have been in the High School at home. I don't know what I expected exactly, but it certainly was n't a bare, square room, a desk on a low platform, some plaster casts, and a lot of plain wooden chairs arranged in rows on an inclined plane. However, when I think the matter over, I don't see what else they could have.

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I saw two policemen fluttering distractedly on the brink – pictures of conscious inefficiency – and felt sorry for the poor things. As I was standing there wondering where I could get a torch, a slim middle-aged man with an iron-gray beard bustled up to them, and the three held a sort of hurried consultation. It ended by the iron-gray man's (he was a professor) suddenly leaving them and mounting the steps of University Hall. His expression as he turned to face the crowd was the kind that tries its best to be persuasive and popular and tremendously resolute all at once, but only succeeds in being wan and furtive. He filled his lungs and began to talk, I suppose, as loud as he could; yet all I heard was an occasional despairing "Now, fellows … It seems to me, fellows … Don't you think it would be better…"

No one paid any attention to him, however, and in an incredibly short time the crowd had crushed itself as far away as it could into the quadrangle's lower end. I made my way over there, and as I was pushing into the thick of things a man next to me exclaimed to no one in particular: "They've sent for Duggie Sherwin, the captain of the team, as a last resort – he's going to say something from the porch of Matthews." I saw I never could get near Matthews by trying to forge straight ahead; so, as I wanted to hear Mr. Duggie (I hadn't known until that minute what he was), I extricated myself and ran around the edge of the crowd. Even then I wasn't very near, and, although I could n't hear a word he said, I could see him – standing on a chair – towering above everybody and smiling a little as if he enjoyed it. I didn't know what he said; to tell the truth, I don't think anybody did, except perhaps the men right around him. Yet in about a minute two or three fellows began to yell, "All over," "The stuff is off," and "Now will you be good;" and the crowd fell back a little, attempting to spread out. The spell somehow was broken; for owing to Mr. Duggie's wonderful influence we would have dispersed quietly if it had n't been for that flighty idiot, Berrisford.

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