At Good Old Siwash. Fitch George Hamlin

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СКАЧАТЬ college in its middle for about fifty years, pretty much everybody in town has attended it at one time or another. None of the police had diplomas, but it was no uncommon thing to see an ex-member of a college debating society delivering groceries, or an ex-president of his class getting up in an engine cab to take the flyer into the city. For years every police magistrate was an old Siwash man, and, though plenty of the boys would get arrested, there were never any thirty-day complications or anything of the sort. Two classes would meet on the main street and muss each other up. The police would arrest nine or ten of the ringleaders. The next morning the prisoners would appear before Squire Jennings, who climbed up on the old college building with his class flag in '54 and kept a rival class away by tearing down the chimney and throwing the bricks at them. Naturally, nothing very deadly happened. The good old fellow would lecture the crowd and let them off with a stern warning. Maybe two or three Seniors would come home late at night from their frat hall and take a wooden Indian cigar sign along with them just for company. One of those Indians is such a steady sort of a chap to have along late at night. Of course, they would be arrested by old Hank Anderson on the courthouse beat, but it wasn't anything serious. They would telephone Frank Hinckley, who was editor of the city daily, and just convalescing from four years of college life himself, and he would come down and bail them out, and Squire Jennings would kick them out of court next morning. Frank was the patron saint of the students for years when it came to bail. He used to say he had all the fun of being a doctor and getting called out nights without having to try to collect any fees. Frank was no Crœus those days and I've seen him go bail for fifteen students at one hundred dollars apiece, when his total assets amounted to a dress suit, three hundred and forty-five photographs and his next week's salary.

      By the time I had come to college, getting arrested had gotten to be a regular formality. A Freshman would go up Main Street at night, trying to hide a nine-foot board sign under his spring overcoat. Halvor Skoogerson, a pale-eyed guardian of the peace, who was studying up to be a naturalized, would arrest him for theft, riot, disorderly conduct, suspicious appearance and intoxication, not understanding why any sober man would want to carry a young lumber-yard home under his coat at night. The prisoner would telephone for Hinckley, who would crawl out of bed, come downtown cussing, and bail away in sleepy tones. The next morning the freshie would go up before Squire Jennings, who would ask him in awful accents if he realized that the state penitentiary was only four hours away by fast train, and that many a man was boarding there who would blush to be seen in the company of a man who had stolen a nine-foot sign and carried it down Main Street, interfering with pedestrians, when there was a perfectly good alley which ought to be used for such purposes. Then he would warn the culprit that the next time he was caught lugging off a billboard or a wooden platform or a corncrib he would be compelled to put it back again before he got breakfast; after which he would tell him to go along and try studying for a change, and the Freshman would go back to college and join the hero brigade. It was a mighty meek man in Siwash who couldn't get arrested those days. Even the hymn singers at the Y. M. C. A. had criminal records. It got so, finally, that whenever we had a nightshirt parade in honor of any little college victory the line of march would lead right through the police station. We knew what was coming and would save the cops the trouble of hauling us over in the hustle wagon.

      Take it all in all, it was about as much fun to be regulated as it was to run the town. But one night Squire Jennings put his other foot into the grave and died entirely; and before any of us realized what was happening a special election had been held and Malachi Scroggs had been elected police magistrate.

      Malachi Scroggs was a triple extract of grouch who lived on the north side two miles away from college in a big white house with one of those old-fashioned dog-house affairs on top of it. He was an acrimonious quarrel all by himself. Sunlight soured when it struck him. I have seen a fox terrier who had been lying perfectly happy on the sidewalk, get up after Scroggs had passed him and go over and bite an automobile tire. He lived on gloom and law-suits and the last time he smiled was 1878—that was when a small boy fell nineteen feet out of a tree while robbing his orchard, and the doctor said he would never be able to rob any more orchards.

      This was the kind of mental astringent Malachi was. Naturally, he loved the gay and happy little college boys. Oh, how he loved us! He had complained to the police regularly during each celebration for twenty years and he had expressed the opinion, publicly, that a college boy was a cross between a hyena and a grasshopper with a fog-horn attachment thrown in free of charge. He wasn't a college man himself, you see—never could find one where the students didn't use slang, probably, and he just naturally didn't understand us at all. Of course, we didn't mind that. It's no credit to carry an interlinear translation of your temperament on your face. So long as he kept in his own yard and quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on Freshmen more enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian Sphinx and John L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate we didn't object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we went up against him in court.

      Part of the Senior class had been having a little choir practice in one of the town restaurants. It was a lovely affair and there wasn't a more cheerful crowd of fellows on earth than they were when they marched down the street at one A. M. eighteen abreast and singing one of the dear old songs in a kind of a steam-siren barytone.

      Now they had never attempted to regulate mere noise in Jonesville, but that night a brand-new policeman had gone on the courthouse beat, and blamed if he didn't arrest the whole bunch for disturbing the peace—when they hadn't broken a single thing, mind you. They were pretty mad about it at first; but after all it was only a joke, and when Hinckley got down to bail them out they were singing with great feeling a song which Jenkins, the class poet, had just composed, and which ran as follows:

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