Young had never seen real football played, but he did not like to say
so--and he did not have to, for just then another cheer was demanded and
they both joined in with the rest of the class, shouting with all their
might, and then the command to march was given, and the line started
forward, irregularly at first and with much treading upon heels, until
one of the Juniors shouted, "Spread out, fellows, spread out; you'll
have" (laughing) "all the close rank work you want when you get on the
campus," and then someone put them in step by saying, "Hep!... Hep!...
Hep!" And when the column was in step, a Junior in the rear who had a
high tenor voice started up the famous marching time of
"Hoorah! Hoorah!
The flag that set us free.
Hoorah! Hoorah!
The year of jubilee."
only the words they used were:
"Nassau! Nassau!
Ring out the chorus free--
Nassau! Nassau!
Thy jolly sons are we.
Care shall be forgotten, all our sorrows flung away,
While we are marching through Princeton!"
"Oh, we'll do 'em!" remarked Young's comrade, excitedly, at the
conclusion of the song.
Young wanted to say something in reply, but he did not know who "they"
were or how they were to be done. So he only said, "Think so?"
"Dead easy--we outnumber them three to two."
Soon the main street, Nassau Street, was reached; and by that time,
after much cheering and many "This ways," nearly two hundred Freshmen
were in the ranks and shouting like good fellows.
The line turned down toward the main college gate.
Along both sides of the streets walked a crowd of onlookers:
upper-classmen in flannel clothes seeming mildly interested in what was
to them an old story; little town boys in short trousers shouting "Ray
for de Freshmans!" and looking forward with excitement to what was
never an old story to them. The shopkeepers were standing in their doors
to see them pass. Upstairs windows opened and heads stuck out.
In a pause between the verses of a song Young heard, far off in the
distance, the quick eager: "Ray! Ray! Ray! Tiger, siss, boom, ah!" of
the short cheer. It was much more sharply and crisply given than the
cheers he had joined in, and on the end of it came the numerals of the
Sophomore class.
Now, he had understood vaguely that there was to be some sort of contest
between his class and the Sophomores, but this blatant, confident cheer
away off somewhere in the distant, indefinite darkness, gave him a
start; just for a moment he felt frightened. He was not the only one.
"Oh, we'll do 'em," said the man next to Young.
"Dead easy!" said Young, this time.
They had passed the first gate by the Dean's house and were marching in
good order down the broad old street.
"Column right--wheel!" said the Junior in front, and they turned in at
the carriage entrance.
Before he quite realized it Young found himself walking on the soft,
green turf of the campus itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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