“Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox—­bred en bawn in a brier-patch!” en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.

CHAPTER XXVII

PERSPECTIVE

I wish I could ever get the question of majors and minors settled to my complete satisfaction.  I thought my college course would settle the matter for all time, but it didn’t.  I suspect that those erudite professors thought they were getting me fitted out with enduring habits of majors and minors, but they seem to have made no allowance for changes of styles nor for growth.  When I received my diploma they seemed to think I was finished, and would stay just as they had fixed me.  They used to talk no little about finished products, and, on commencement day, appeared to look upon me as one of them.  On the whole, I’m glad that I didn’t fulfil their apparent expectations.  I have never been able to make out whether their attentions, on commencement day, were manifestations of pride or relief.  I can see now that I must have been a sore trial to them.  In my callow days, when they occupied pedestals, I bent the knee to them by way of propitiating them, but I got bravely over that.  At first, what they taught and what they represented were my majors, but when I came to shift and reconstruct values, some of them climbed down off their pedestals, and my knee lost some of its flexibility.

We had one little professor who afforded us no end of amusement by his taking himself so seriously.  The boys used to say that he wrote letters and sent flowers to himself.  He would strut about the campus as proudly as a pouter-pigeon, never realizing, apparently, that we were laughing at him.  At first, he impressed us greatly with his grand air and his clothes, but after we discovered that, in his case at least, clothes do not make the man, we refused to be impressed.  He could split hairs with infinite precision, and smoke a cigarette in the most approved style, but I never heard any of the boys express a wish to become that sort of man.  Had there occurred a meeting, on the campus, between him and Zeus he would have been offended, I am sure, if Zeus had failed to set off a few thunderbolts in his honor.  We used to have at home a bantam rooster that could create no end of flutter in the chicken yard, and could crow mightily; but when I reflected that he could neither lay eggs nor occupy much space in a frying-pan, I demoted him, in my thinking, from major rank to a low minor, and awarded the palm to one of the less bumptious but more useful fowls.  Our little professor had degrees, of course, and has them yet, I suspect; but no one ever discovered that he put them to any good use.  For that reason we boys lost interest in the man as well as his garnishments.