Already the professors were beginning to row about me and report me for cutting recitations.  On the score of my scholarship and my knowing my subject they had no complaint.  It was that I disrupted their classes and made for lax discipline.

But I seldom cut class deliberately....  I would find myself lost in a book back in the “stack” as the big room that housed the tiers of books was called.  The day would be dusking, the lights of evening glimmering below in town, to my bewildered eyes!  The day gone, when I had stepped back among the books at nine o’clock, intending to while away a half hour between classes! (Once it was Sidney’s Arcadia that entranced me so).

Or I would set out for class ... hatless ... my hair tousled and long ... in my sandals that were mocked at by my colleagues ... my books under arm ... and fall into a reverie that would fetch me up, two miles or so away, a-stray up a by-road flanked with a farmhouse and young cornfields.

Then it would be too late for my schoolday, and I would make a day of it ... would perhaps get acquainted with some farmer and his family, have dinner and supper at his house, and swap yarns with him and the rest of his people.

* * * * *

Jack Travers was as proud of my foot-trip to Osageville as if he had accomplished it himself.

“The boys out at the Sig-Kappa house expect three or four kegs of beer in from Kansas City ... come on out and help us to celebrate.”

“But I don’t drink.”

“Go on! you’ve told me about the time you did what you called ’slopping up’ down in Texas!”

“That was only once ... and since then I’ve become a physical culturist.”

“Well, come and join the party anyhow ... it won’t hurt you to look on.”

My curiosity impelled me to accept the invitation to the “keg party” as such a jamboree was known among the students.

The kegs of beer waited us at the station ... disguised with misleading labels ... “chemicals, handle with care.”  Tenderly we loaded them on the waggon that had been hired.  The driver sat smiling as the solicitious students heaved them up and secured them firmly....

We sat dignified and quiet, till the outskirts of the town were reached ... then the whip was brought down and away we whooped, bouncing along the country road....

We whipped off down the road into the open country with a roar of singing and shouting.  We sat on the kegs to keep them from jumping out, as we urged the driver to ply the whip.

* * * * *

There was a corner in a cornfield that bent inward, hidden from the casual passer-by by a grove of Osage orange trees.  Here we drew up, jumped out, tenderly conveyed the kegs forth ... the ground we had chosen, in the corner of the field, was too rocky for planting.  It was sultry early afternoon, of a late spring day.