They would not, however, let me rise.  So, thought I, when we have taken the burden of slavery off from the poor negro, unholy prejudice against color keeps him from rising to a level with the rest of the community.  I begged that I might get up.  They told me that my morning exertions required longer rest.  I told them that I must get my Greek.  Whereupon one of them stood over me, with his arms raised in a deploring attitude, and said,—­

  “Sternitur infelix!—­
  —­Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos.”

This, dear Aunty, is the lamentation of a Latin poet over a Greek soldier lying prostrate on the battle-field, far from home;—­“and dying he remembers his sweet Greece.”  So they made game of me with the help of the Classics, giving poignancy to their jokes by polishing the tips with classical allusions.  While I was under the “delusion,” they sung snatches of Bruce’s Address to his army; and when they came to the words

  “Who so base as be a slave?—­
  Let him turn and flee,”

one of them ran a cane under the delusion and punched me with it, keeping stroke to the music.  This was little short of profaneness.  They asked me if the chair-maker’s harnesses were probably made by free or slave labor, alluding, unfeelingly, to a mistake which I made in a recitation one day, when two of those very students had kept me talking about slavery up to the very moment when the recitation-bell rang, so that I had not looked at my lesson.  There are men in my class, and these were some of them, who, I am told, are plotting to prevent my having the first appointment, to which they know that my marks at recitation entitle me.  But may I never be so prejudiced against those who differ from me on the subject of slavery as to deny them credit for things which they have fairly earned.  I leave this to the avowed enemies of human rights.  For the cause of the slave, I must gain the first appointment.

I alluded, just now, to my feelings at witnessing tricks played on the Freshmen.  Had the Sophomores asked my advice before they played those tricks, I should have dissuaded them; but when they played them, with such courage and enterprise, I stood before them with admiration.  But while I was under that quilt, I found that I did not admire the Sophomores at all, any more than I did the Seniors who then had me in their power.

The enemies of freedom, in College, had a great triumph the other evening.  One of them, in one of the Literary Societies, read an Original Poem, the title of which was, “The Fly-time of Freedom.”  He spoke of “our glorious summer of Liberty” being infested and pestered with noisy, provoking things, which he characterized under the names of dor-bugs, millers, and all those creatures which fly into the room when the lamp is lighted; the swarms of black gnats which are about your head in the woods; horse-flies which stick, and leave blood running; and devil’s-darning-needles.