Harvard Stories: Sketches of the UndergraduatePost, Waldron Kintzing
History
Harvard Stories: Sketches of the Undergraduate
Post, Waldron Kintzing
College stories, American; College students -- Fiction; Harvard University -- Fiction
"First it gave us all the news from Cambridge;--among other things, that
we had won the boat-race on Lake Quinsigamond. Randolph said that almost
made up for Gettysburg, and we had a little cheer all to ourselves. I
remember a man came running up to hear what the news was and whether the
Yankees had been licked anywhere. We told him not that we knew of, but
Harvard had beaten Yale, and he went off damning us for making such a
row about nothing. The letter went on to say that there would probably
be no race that year, as most of the rowing men had gone off to the war.
Almost all of our old set had gone into the army, it said. That jolly,
good-for-nothing rattle, bad Bob Bowling, who was always on the ragged
edge of expulsion, always in hot water with the Faculty, and who had
been booked by every one for a very bad end, had disappointed them all
and found a distinguished career in a cavalry regiment. But the hero of
the class was little Digges, 'Nancy' Digges, the quiet, shy, little
pale-faced student who looked as if he would blow away in a strong wind,
and whom no one had thought was good for anything but grubbing for Greek
roots. This man had been promoted several times for gallantry. At
Gettysburg, when Longstreet's corps was right on top of his battery,
when his supports had been driven in, his horses shot, and his gunners
were falling around him, he had dragged his guns back by hand, one by
one, and stopped to spike the last while one of our men was reaching for
him with a bayonet. When I read this we both exclaimed: 'Well, I'll be
hanged, Little Nancy!'"
"It was at Gettysburg also that Jim had seen Harry Rodes. The last time
that Jim had seen him before that was just before leaving college, when
Rodes had been elected president of the Hasty Pudding; this time he was
lying in the grass, where it was red. There was like news of several
other old chums.
"'As for your humble servant,' Jim wrote, 'he has only succeeded in
getting himself ignominiously jugged by your Johnnies.' I heard, long
afterwards, how he had been captured, pinned under his dead horse, with
a broken sabre, and three of our men to his score. 'This is not so much
fun,' he went on, 'as that night in the Newton jail, which perhaps you
may remember, Tom. You got me into that, you riotous companion and
perverter of my youth.' I remembered that scrape of our Sophomore year
very well, but I had a strong impression that it was Jim who upset the
officer of the law. He told us he could stand Libby, however, well
enough, if he only had a little smoke, and asked if we could not give
aid and comfort to the invader in the shape of tobacco. At this Randolph
exclaimed: 'Jim Standish without his pipe! That is a real case of
suffering among the prisoners!' The letter wound up with an injunction
to answer it at once and tell all about ourselves and the other boys on
our side, and with the hope that we should all be at the next triennial
dinner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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