as he reflected, he heard those Juniors, over the
way, singing. Just now they were chanting that
exquisitely beautiful Hawaiian melody, “Aloha
Oe,” or “Farewell to Thee,” making
the words tell of parting from their Alma Mater.
There was something in the refrain that seemed to
break down Thor’s wall of reserve, to melt away
his aloofness, and he caught himself listening eagerly
as they sang.
Somehow he felt no desire to condemn those care-free
youths, to call their singing silly foolishness, to
say they were wasting their time and their fathers’
money. Queer, but he actually liked to hear them
sing, he realized he had come to listen for their
saengerfests. Now that he had to leave college,
for the first time he began to ponder on what he must
leave. Not alone books and study, but—
As he stood there, an ache in his throat, and an awful
sorrow overwhelming him, with the richly blended voices
of the happy Juniors drifting across to him, chanting
a song of old Ballard, big Thor murmured softly:
“What did little Theophilus say? What was
it Shakespeare wrote? Oh, I have it:
“’This thou perceivest, which
makes thy love more strong—
To love that well, which thou must leave
ere long.’”
THOR’S AWAKENING
“There’s a hole in the bottom
of the sea,
And we’ll put Bannister in that
hole!
In that hole—in—that—hole—
Oh, we’ll put Bannister in that
hole!”
“In the famous words of the late Mike Murphy,”
said T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., “the celebrated
Yale and Penn track trainer, ’you can beat a
team that can’t be beat, but—you
can’t beat a team that won’t be beat!’
Latham must be in the latter class.”
It was the Bannister-Latham game, and the first half
had just ended. Captain Butch Brewster’s
followers had trailed dejectedly from Bannister Field
to the Gym, where Head Coach Corridan was flaying them
with a tongue as keen as the two-edged sword that
drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. A
cold, bleak November afternoon, a leaden sky lowered
overhead, and a chill wind swept athwart the field;
in the concrete stands, the loyal “rooters”
of the Gold and Green, or of the Gold and Blue, shivered,
stamped, and swung their arms, waiting for the excitement
of the scrimmage again to warm them. Yet, the
Bannister cohorts seemed silent and discouraged, while
the Latham supporters went wild, singing, cheering,
howling. A look at the score-board explained this:
END OF FIRST HALF: SCORE:
Bannister ........ 0
Latham ........... 3
The statement of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., swathed in
a gold and green blanket and humped on the Bannister
bench, to shivering little Theophilus Opperdyke, the
Phillyloo Bird, Shad Weatherby, and several more collegians
who had joined him when the half ended, was singularly
appropriate. In Latham’s light, fast eleven,
