The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1898-11-18

advertised at 5000 for the college term.
He finds a small back room on the
second floor of a. dingy frame house,
six or eight blocks from the college
yard and buildings. He is disguised,
and turns away for further search. He
hunts over town all day, possibly two
or three days and then is again back at
the $500 room to engage it. The room
looks less dingy noW-Re has seen so
many others that are worse-so he feels
that he can be quite cozy and comfort
able in it. But he thinks he must have
more furniture, so he goes to Boston
and buys an easy chair, a desk and a
chair, pictures for the walls, statues
for the nantel-and then he figures UP
the cost of all his purchases and is
| amazed. He wishes he had not been
so extravagant, but the wish comes too
late.
His "Soph" friends chuck'o delight
fully and encourage him to additional
expenditures They point out the need
of rugs, books and a hundred little
things that they say he cannot get
along without, and the freshman, Won
dering vaguely the while what pa
will say, spends and spends his money.
But at last the room is furnished and
decorated. Flags and pictures cover
the walls, crimson pillows fill the wide
window seat at the front of the study
room, and the "Freshie' has a place
he calls home.
AS vet, however, he has no regular
boarding place. He has been eating
around at the cafes and lunch rooms
that abound at Cambridge, but has de-
termined on no particular place for
meals. This he usually does the first
two weeks of the college year and when
the boarding and rooming places have
both been decided upon, the freshman
becomes an ''old Harvard man''-that is
4 T
'Freshie" ever became. The full dig
nifty of the title is not reached till his
sophomore years.
Having become an old Harvard
man the freshman takes courage to in
terest himself in the college he has be-
come identified with. He asks his
'soph." friends about the university
records in athletics and questions up
per-class men-such as will deign to
notice him at all-about the historical
associations of the college. He. peeps
into the rooms of Hollis hall that were
occupied by Emerson, Sumner, Tho
reau, A. P. Peabody and Wendell Phil
lips, and he gaZes with certain awe at
the old Harvard hall, which, tradi-
ton says, was stripped of its leaden
roof in 1775 to furnish bullets for the
American patriots. Possibly he could
ferret out, by interviewing some of the
old residents of Cambridge, other his
torically interesting points about the
university, but now registration comes
and he is otherwise engrossed He Sc
lects the studies he wants and school
keeps.
The freshman is now in and out the
college yard more or less, at Massa-
chusetts, Harvard and Sever halls-the
three principal recitation and lecture
rooms-and he sees and meets plenty
of fellow students. He hears stories
of college experiences from upper class
men, and is fired with an ambition to
see real college life. He sees John, the
orange man." driving about the college
yard, and is told that the White-haired,
bent old man has peddled fruit and
CONNECTIONS for several generations of
Harvardites. He hears strange tales
of scrapes in which the yard cop the
college Waterman, figures prominently,
and he learns that Harvard has for
many years had a college bootblack
one Professor Jordan, now a grizzled,
wrinkled old negro of about 20 years.
Mister Jackson, sub, de college tai
lor, ;uh,' visits the freshman and ar
ranges to keep his trousers creased
and cleaned at the rate Of s cents a
week per pair. Rival laundries besiege
the newcomer with offers to do his
work cheap. And with the rest of his
many experiences the freshman finds a
leisure interval long enough in which to
purchase and experiment with his first
pipe.
All, but that is a glorious moment,
when he walks through Harvard
square, a pile OF books under his ARM
his trousers rolled two inches at the
bottom and a bulldog pipe held tightly
between his teeth. OF, course, he would
much prefer to have en- nobby golf
suit and a natty red Harvard cap, but
he must wait till his sophomore year
to wear such things. Yet the pipe
why, that is a. triumph in itself. He
feels a man with it in his teeth, and
he walks with erect shoulders and a
swinging step, proud in this first be-
lief in his own manhood.
No, Harvard college is not what it
was in the fathers days, not a place
for such rolliclling fun as lit was once,
but still it is a place where the youth
is thrown sufficiently on his own re-
sources to develop manly traits or IN
wholesome habits