Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/226

 of youth, which in certain months of the year cannot express itself in athletics, and yet must come out somehow. But this wise young professor did not understand such primitive motives of action, because he came from a large New England university, where life is an old, old story at nineteen or twenty, and the youth of his set were wont to divert themselves by dissecting their souls and making Meredithian aphorisms and patronizing the universe. He was not accustomed to such boyish spontaneity.

When the time came, and it came soon after this, a goodly number of these same yawping lads went to the front to get shot at, and an equal proportion of the New Englanders likewise, and both did the thing equally well; but at this time, down there in their academic seclusion, they did not care so very much about Cuba, and knew less. They were too full of their own undergraduate interests to feel very strongly on such trivial matters as monarchical tyranny or international complications. When they had time to read the papers they generally turned over to the athletic column. But they had