The engine whistles it, the crowd shouts it, and the hills give it back again as the laden train slips down to the main line and starts on its way to town. Streaming with cardinal bunting, it looks like a burning thing as it rushes over the marsh land, sending the horses in the field snorting away, and bringing women to the doors of cottages along the tracks. In their excitement the delirious Sophomores and Juniors hang out of the windows and throw kisses wildly to these women, who grin and wave back, doubtless saying something about "them crazy students." A placid red cow is greeted with cheers, the scarlet under-flannels of hard-working South San Francisco, flapping merrily from the line in the November breeze, fan the frenzy, while the engine toots the yell and the car-windows are aflame with gleaming flags. From now on the students besiege the city, and the town is theirs as surely as if the Mayor had met them at its entrance with a symbolic golden key. Shop windows are brilliant with the rival colors, the streets are a shifting riot of red and blue and yellow, with a plague-spot here and there where some fanatics have striped their derby hats with blue and gold ribbon, or a color-blind Stanford man flaunts a villainously purple chrysanthemum. On the curbing, fakirs are selling shining red Christmas berries and violets and great bursting carnations, and chrysanthemums like yellow ostrich-plumes. Through all this splendor you keep close to Professor Diemann, for you know he is going to the hotel where the team is, and that stalwart lineman you are thinking of most to-day is up there with them. You slip upstairs under the protecting shadow of the associate coach, passing the suspicious eyes of the trainers and the hurried, unsympathetic glance of Lyman, the manager, and you find your particular hero lying on his bed in all the glory of his new sweater with its clean white S, a great fresh specimen of the lustiest student-body in the world. You take his hand, almost afraid to squeeze it tightly, lest you cause some harm to the big frame in which your hopes are centered, and you tell him how glad you are he has made the team and that we are bound to win. And if this is his first game, or if some man has pressed him dangerously for the position he had last year, he will smile and say, "We'll do our best." Then the rubber comes in and you slip away, wondering why the beneficence of the Creator to man on earth should have made one fellow like your idol up there on the bed and another like you, crawling unnoticed into the street, throwing out your thin, incapable legs in a quick walk to join your crowd at the restaurant.