When my sophomore year began I awaited the cane rush which, according to old Columbia custom, took place between the sophomores and the freshmen at the beginning of each academic year, and I was prepared for it; I knew also what it meant to “play the game.” This time my class had to do the attacking and I helped with a vengeance. The muscles which had been hardened in the Hackensack meadows proved most effective and the result was that shortly I had the freshmen’s cane on the ground, and was lying flat over it, covering it with my chest. The pressure of a score of freshmen and sophomores piled up on top of me threatened to squeeze the cane through my chest bone, which already, I imagined, was pressing against my lungs, my difficult breathing leading me to think that my last hour had come. Fortunately, the umpires cleared away the lively heap of struggling boys on top of me, and I breathed freely again. Some freshmen were found stretched alongside of me with their hands holding on to the stick. An equal number of sophomores held on, and, consequently, the umpires declared the rush a draw. Nobody was anxious to have another rush, and it was proposed by the freshmen to settle the question of class superiority by a wrestling-match, two best out of three falls, catch as catch can. They had a big fellow who had some fame as a wrestler of great strength, and they issued a defiant challenge to the sophomores. My classmates held a meeting in order to pick a match for the freshman giant, but nobody seemed to be quite up to the job. Finally I volunteered, declaring that I was not afraid to tackle the freshman giant. “Do you expect to down him with Greek verses and mathematical formulæ?” shouted some of my classmates, who had grave doubts about the muscle and the wrestling ability of a fellow who had won Greek and mathematical prizes. They knew nothing about my strenuous mowing in the Hackensack meadows during three long months of that summer. The captain of the class crew approached me, felt my biceps, my chest, and my back, and shouted, “All right!” The wrestling-match came off, and the freshman giant had no show with a boy who had learned the art of wrestling on the pasture-lands of Idvor, and had held his own against experienced mowers in the Hackensack meadows. The victory was quick and complete, and my classmates carried me in triumph to Fritz’s saloon, not far from the college, where many a toast was drunk to “Michael the Serbian.” From that day on my classmates called me by my first name and took me up as if I had been a distinguished descendant of Alexander Hamilton himself. My scholastic victory in Greek and mathematics meant nothing to my classmates, because it was a purely personal matter, but my athletic victory meant everything, because it was a victory of my whole class. Had I won my scholastic victory in competition with a representative from another college, then the matter would have had an entirely different aspect.