In the small hours, the conspirators, provided with a duplicate key to the professor’s door, made a stealthy attempt to open it, but found his key on the inside and were unable to open the door, but woke the victim, who, however, dared not raise an alarm.  One of the smaller students tried to climb in through the ventilator, but this was nailed down, and then as a last resort the “smoking machine” was brought into action.  This was an “infernal machine,” employed in hazing students who had in any way offended the opinion of the class, especially by indecorous subservience to the authorities or informing against their fellow students.  The latter was a rare offense and never pardoned.  The smoking machine consisted of a short length of stove-pipe with a nozzle at each end, into one of which was introduced a bellows, and the other was put through the keyhole of the door of the offender.  In the body of the pipe was a bed of lighted charcoal, and on this was sprinkled tobacco and assafoetida, and the smoke was driven into the room in such quantities that no human being could resist it more than a few minutes.  The smoking was continued for ten minutes, when, as the professor did not surrender, it began to be feared that the joke had gone too far, and two of the conspirators went out to see if there were any external signs of vitality, and found that the victim had opened his window and was lying with his head below the window-sill so as to be out of the smoke which poured out over him.  I suppose that the delegates were drunk, for one of them threw a block of wood at the professor’s head which, missing him, drove in the window pane and finished the experiment.

It was the gravest outrage of my time, and had there not been so large a part of the senior class implicated in the conspiracy, directly or indirectly, there is no doubt that the doctor would have taken the most severe measures for the punishment of those concerned.  No partial punishment would have been possible, and the general irritation against that particular professor was so great in the class, and his course had been so little in conformity with the usages of the college, that the doctor thought best to ignore the affair completely.  The professor was completely cowed, and we had no more browbeating from him.  But the practical jokes played on him were never attempted with any other member of the faculty, all of them having been trained in the doctor’s own school.  Except possibly the oldest of them, all were graduates at Union under him; and his system of elastic, unceasing pressure, constant and unobtrusive surveillance, and simple appeals to the students’ higher interests and manly feeling were so generally potent in the government of the college that the petty tyranny of the mensuration professor, nicknamed “Geodesy,” found no support in the faculty, though the same elastic system which threw the responsibility of final results on the individual left him the same freedom of action which it gave us, and he had to learn his lesson while he taught us ours.