held on. It was a battle of giants, and those that were there will never forget it.

And while they struggled, now one on top and now the other, they rolled over to the extreme lower part of the circle toward the path leading to the railway station. That part of the audience fell back. The ring broke. Some closed in around them.

Then, while the referee was shouting, "Get back! Get back!" the freshman was suddenly seen to rise on his knees yelling shrilly, like a wild beast in pain. "You would bite me, would you, you——." He sprang to his feet. The blood from his nose was smeared all over his face. A furious wrench jerked Parker from the ground. With what was extraordinary power Hill whirled him; part of the way the feet dragged, though some like to tell that the whole of Parker was clean in the air all the way round; he whirled him about, as you would whirl a pillow with both arms; then, suddenly reversing all his big weight and simultaneously twisting the hickory, he snapped the sophomore off in the air and lifted the cane high and dry above his head. "The freshman has it," shrieked a shrill voice.

He felt himself grabbed, he heard many noises, he went up, up in the air, and then he forgot.

The big leather chair was the first thing he saw, and he knew he was in the Witherspoon room again. Then he heard many voices talking at once. He remembered now that he had been hearing them for ages. They echoed inside his head some place.

"Are you all right now?"

He raised his lids a little higher and there was Drake bending over him as tenderly as a mother.

"I think you ought to know, you great big awkward old farmer, that you saved the day for us." Drake looked as delighted as if he had done it himself.

"I've seen a good many sprees," said another voice near his head, which Hill had never heard before, "but that was the finest thing I ever saw; and I'm blame glad you did him, though I am a senior and lost twenty-five bats on it." Hill moved his head and saw the important-looking senior with glasses.

The farmer now laughed his hideous laugh. That showed he was all right.

One of the sophomore coachers approached the bed, and after looking up and down Hill's bulk a moment, said: "The trouble with you, you big freshman, is that you don't know when you're beaten. My man had that cane twice, but you wouldn't let go."

"Well, that's Princeton spirit, isn't it?" remarked the 'Varsity Captain, who had something to say to Hill later on.

Ramsay, the light weight, came running up the entry three steps at a time. He had been leading cheers for Hill out-doors and now he began hugging him. "Oh, farmer, you're a dandy. Give me your hand."

But when the farmer raised his hand he found the cane was still in it. "Here, little one, you can have this. I've had my fun out of it." This showed how green he was.

"No," said Ramsay; "you're to keep that forever. What did you win it for, anyway?"

As a matter of fact winning the spree meant much more to the big placid farmer than a hickory cane to hang with ribbons over his mantelpiece, and more than a bit of fame in another kind of athletics, too. Much more. As we all know now.

THE MADNESS OF POLER STACY

In freshman year they say, "Are you ready to feed your face?" instead of "Are you going to dinner?" and at the eating clubs they call the milk-pitcher the "cow," and shout "Butter me, please," when they wish the butter handed to them. All their desires and opinions they express in variously bold and vulgar metaphors, which are witty. This is because there is no one to tell them they must not. The boy is a college man now. He is free from the restraint of home or school or both, and he doesn't know quite what to do with his liberty.

Like a young town horse turned loose for the first time in the open green of the country, he sometimes loses his head and frisks and snorts and kicks up his heels to an unbecoming degree. This is a way of saying that every once in a while some little boy (the strictly reared kind, usually), in his eagerness to show his fellows how reckless and devilish he is, goes so far that he never comes quite back. Others dissipate merely to the extent of cutting chapel twice in succession or pretending that they have not poled all night for an examination. In still others it breaks out in a different form, and they persuade themselves that they are naughty cynics or bold, bad agnostics. But that will do for that.

The point is this: Sooner or later, in some form or another, this spirit is bound to get hold of every young man who is worthy of the name, and, like measles or calf-love, it is better to have it sooner. In the very young it is interesting. After that it is not. And the older one is when it comes, the more he reminds the onlookers of the frolicksome antics of some ancient, misguided cow, or of a kittenish summer girl, aged twenty-eight. When seen in a poler it is pathetic.

At his first eating club in freshman year, H. Stacy felt himself snubbed from the start; and when the crowd, which was not slow, became well enough acquainted with one another and with the glorious freedom of college life to pour syrup down their neighbors' backs and to hurl fried eggs and coarse jokes about the table, little Stacy, although he always said, "That was a pretty good shot," and wiped the potato from his ear with a noisy laugh, saw that he was not in his own element, which he should have seen a month before, and got out.

He joined a club of a very different sort of freshmen, who were too busy speculating upon their chances at the approaching Divisional Examinations to invent names for tough beefsteak, or learn what was going on in Trenton at the theatres and other places.

This was his element. He drew in long, full breaths of freedom and sunshine, and told himself that now he knew what was meant by the Joy of College Life.

Here he settled down to the methodical poler habits he was intended for, and when the next catalogue was issued his mother and sister pointed out to the minister's wife the name of "Horatio B. Stacy, New Jersey," in the small group of names called "First Group," and said, "We knew he would do it." In his sophomore year he did it again and won a prize or two besides and became a minor light in the Cliosophic Society, and by this time he held in that Hall an office, the name of which was a secret, and could not be divulged even to his sister Fannie. He studied for high marks and was called a "greasy poler." But he got the high marks.

You must not think he had no friends. He made some firm ones. About these he could write home to his sister Fannie, telling what magnificent characters some of them were. Often of a Saturday night, if he had no essays to write or debates to prepare, he slipped off his eye-shades and pattered across the campus to his friends' rooms and knocked gently and said, "How do?" and conversed for an hour on the difficulty of taking notes when your neighbor is borrowing your knife, or about the elective courses for the next term. And down at the club they had great horse calling each other "Blamed Neo-Platonists" and "Doggoned Transcendentalists." Nor was it all shop. One of them thought himself in love. It was Stacy that used to wink at the others and bob his head and say, "I know some one who got a letter to-day." They had great fun at the club.

By reason of his freshman year's disgust he remained innocent, which was right, and