Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/75



"I must run along;" said a senior to me one evening not long ago when he was making an informal call at my house, "we are initiating this week, and we have to give our freshmen a little work out tonight." "Heaven help the freshmen," I replied as I recalled the procedure which was followed at the initiations with which I was familiar during the first few years of my fraternity life, and those other tales of getting the freshmen into shape to which I listened as they fell from the lips of willing undergraduates who had lived through the siege.

It was great sport to send prospective brothers out on a quiet stroll to the cemetery clad in empty flour barrels, to set them to wheeling doll baby carriages about the campus, to make them fish all day, with a pin hook in the dry "Boneyard," or to force them to beg for a hand out at the President's back door only to get into more public and embarrassing disgrace. Such stunts always brought the fraternity into deserved prominence and served to convince the general public that we were the fools they thought us. There were other sorts of goings-on of which I have been told, some of them devised with the keenest insight into the methods of human torture, mental and physical. There