THE FIRST DAY AT COLLEGE
captain; he braced up wonderfully and became the hardest student in the class but he was a baseball player, and one of the professors of science—there he is with the doctor's hood—kept on conditioning him out of habit. They try to be fair, but professors are human, many of them. There was the old General of my day, professor of German. He's dead now, lasted through two foreign revolutions and one American war, with narrow escapes from prison on the eve of execution and all that sort of thing, only to die of apoplexy one day on a New York ferry-boat, like a mere corpulent commuter. The old General was very human, and the way Jimmy Westerfield, a classmate of mine, used to get around him was beautiful. There was an offensively studious man in the class, who wasn't human at all; used to spring from his seat energetically when called upon to recite and rattle off declensions in a glib, self-righteous manner which was very irritating to all of us, especially the low-stand men. Jimmy saw that the manner and the strident voice bothered the General as
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