Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/14

 be allowed to board at lunch counters or to live in private dormitories.

It is a natural tendency for young people, and especially for young men, to join more or less closely into groups for the furtherance and the development of mutual interests, and it is a tendency which we should expect and foster in college as elsewhere. Far back in my youth in the country neighborhood in which I lived it was the habit of a special group of boys with whom I associated to meet at more or less regular intervals under the "Iron Bridge" or up in the hay loft to discuss plans and projects of mutual interest. We, too, had our secrets and our signs almost as serious and as significant as are those of the college fraternity today. I knew by the peculiar note which he uttered as he passed our door when Bill Boys was going home at night, and I learned to convey unwritten volumes across the school room to Taylor Curtis through the mystic symbols of our order. Even today, at middle age, I have my pals, and we meet together at intervals and are bound together by bonds not unlike those which gripped me to those companions of my childhood. In a similar way, though now in a more tangible and a more way, the members of a college fraternity are bound. If the young man can afford it, for like everything else worth while the fraternity costs something, if such an organization