Page:Lynch Williams--The girl and the game.djvu/358

 rather formidable in Freshman year. Later, when you came to them in the natural order of things, you found they were not so bad after all. You slid over them and still managed to smile occasionally. "And so with life," as Sophomore poets say. You slide over from being a boy to being a man without realizing where one stopped and the other began, and it isn't so bad after all. You will have to work now more than you play, instead of playing more than you work, but that is not very hard luck. You wouldn't want to fool around this way much longer anyhow. It's no fun for an upper-classman to paint his class numerals on fence-posts, like a Freshman.

Old graduates, or rather the young ones, are given to telling you what a struggle life is. But they seldom confess to you how much eager enjoyment they get out of the struggle even when they don't win first prize. It is a shame for me to give them away in this fashion, the noble army of martyrs; you can look upon it as grim necessity, or sad-faced duty, if you prefer; but the work