Charles Flandrau - The Diary of a Freshman

Accessibility to bores who want to kill time while waiting for their next lecture. At first you think this is Popularity.

Enforced quiet after 9 P.M. – at which hour you usually close your books and feel like making a noise.

Enforced activity before 9 A.M. – until which hour you always close your eyes and try not to feel at all.

Necessity of burning a kind of coal that refuses to light (or to stay lighted) for anybody but the janitor, who is never in the basement, where you always firmly believe (in spite of your daily failure) that you are going to find him.

Mrs. Muldooney's is by all means the most desirable place. It is crowded, hot, noisy, expensive, and not particularly nourishing. Mrs. Muldooney is a tall, grim, steel-armored old cruiser of sixty-five, with dark-blue hair, who doles out eleven canned cherries to every man at luncheon and sends in word from the kitchen that there aren't any more. She tries to collect twenty-five cents when you have a guest; but as you promptly disown your guest, she is usually foiled. Her place, however, is always crowded with Freshmen, and I ought to go there.

My allowance is generous. It ought to satisfy my every need; but it won't.

Try enthusiastically but not too seriously to take part in everything. In this way you find out what kind of amusement really amuses you – which as you grow older is a source of great content.

Friends, in the true sense of the word, are divine accidents beyond all human control. You will probably meet with four or five such accidents in your college career. For the rest – be polite to everybody, and you will soon have the satisfaction of knowing that your position, both in the University and in the world, is, at least, unique.

Vide supra , under "Friends."

I was just going to ask him something else, when we heard Mrs. Chester exclaiming, —

"Land sakes, if it ain't Mr. Duggie! I saw the light from Mis' Buckson's parlor."

"Hello, you dear old buzzard! How dare you turn me out in the cold this way?" he called to her; and as she came in, he jumped up and took both her hands. "I 'm so glad to see you again." She gave him a little push, and looked pleased.

"Law, Mr. Duggie – how you talk! He's got real fleshy – ain't he?" she added, looking at me. She asked him where he 'd been all summer, and he told her he 'd been off shooting in the Rocky Mountains, and had brought her a breastpin made of an elk's tooth that she'd have to wear on Sundays when she went to see her married daughter in Somerville. I thought I ought to leave, but did not know how to interrupt them exactly; so I turned and examined some silver cups on the mantelpiece. There were five beauties, but I could n't make out the inscriptions on them.

"You 've had lots of visitors the last few days. They kept a-comin' to find out when you 'll be back. The Dean was here to-day – a real sociable gentleman, aren't he? – and he wants you to go right 'round and see him as soon as you can. And yesterday that little man – I forget his name – oh, you know, he's the President of the Crimson – came to find out about something. He said you were the only one who could tell him. And then there 've been lots of young men to see about the football – oh, my, just crowds of them, and they all left notes. I 'll run down and get them, and then I 'll put up your bed."

After she left, I said good-night. It's awfully late, and I have to get up early, to be in time to register.

I wonder who he is. I hope he didn't think I was fresh. I don't believe he did, though, for as I was going he said, —

"We 're such near neighbors, you must drop in when you haven't anything better to do."

Mamma's train must have passed Utica by this time.

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.

A dissatisfied-looking little man with a red necktie sat reading a newspaper at the desk when I went in, and near him – reading a book – was a younger fellow who looked as if he might be a student. There were piles of registration cards on the desk, and after I had stood there a moment, not knowing what to do, the little man looked up absently from his paper, handed me some cards with a feeble sort of gesture, and murmured in a melancholy, slightly trembling, and very sarcastic voice, —

Then he yawned, and took up the paper again. The young man, without apparently thinking this remark in the least odd, closed his book on his thumb so as not to lose the place, and gave me another card, saying in a perfectly businesslike voice, —

"Please fill this one out, too." I sat down at a bench to write, and just then five or six other fellows came in. One of them was the good-looking chap (with the pretty mother) who rooms in the same house with me. I hadn't seen him since the day I signed my lease. I listened to hear if the little man at the desk would spring anything weird on them; but as they went right up to him, and took cards as if they knew all about it, and retreated to the back of the room, he didn't have time. They talked and laughed a good deal, and once they got into a scuffle, but the instructors didn't even glance up. I finished answering the questions on my cards, and was reading them over, when one of the fellows behind me said, —

"I'll ask him – we live in the same house;" and the handsome one came and sat down beside me. There was something they did n't understand in making out the cards, and the first thing I knew, they were all gathered around me examining mine. I felt quite important. But the next minute I felt equally cheap.

The cards that had been given us by the young man with the book had to be filled out with one's name and address and religion. When the good-looking one (whose name I 've since found out is Berrisford) came to it, he began to giggle, and after he had written on it he showed it to the man next to him, who burst out laughing, and passed it on to the others. They all laughed as soon as they saw it, and I was just about to hold out my hand to take it, when the young instructor closed his book, and said in a rather tired, dry tone, —

"By the way, unless you actually happen to be Buddhists or Hindus or Mohammedans, or followers of Confucius, kindly refrain from saying so on the card; only four men have indulged in that particular jest this morning, which, in comparison with former years, is really very few. I begin to feel encouraged; pray don't depress me."

I don't know what Berrisford had written, but he got very red while the instructor was speaking, and crumpled the card into a little lump which he afterward slipped into his pocket. The others pretended to be deeply absorbed in their writing just then; but one of them snorted hysterically.