Just then "Minerva" Powelton, the recently chosen captain of the class baseball team, joined Lee and Young, or rather he joined Lee; he paid little attention to Young. He had been brought up to keep away from boys whose family he knew nothing of, and he considered Young beneath him in every way. He got over it in time. "Say, Lucky," he said in a low tone, putting his arm fawningly around little Lee, "the Sophs will be getting out the procs pretty soon. We'd better watch out." "Naw," said Lucky, with the conviction of superior knowledge. "Not till after Saturday's game, at the earliest. Why, in my brother's Freshman year they did not do it till after cane-spree." "Well, we'd better keep our eyes peeled, all the same," said Captain Powelton. Young looked sober and said nothing. To tell the truth, he did not know what they were talking about. Was it that the Sophs were going to turn the college proctors against them in some cowardly way? But what Saturday's baseball game between the two classes had to do with it he knew no more than what a cane-spree might be; and he walked home wondering. That evening at the club one of the fellows--who, perhaps, had also overheard a conversation--said, in a pause, "I understand the Sophs will bring out the procs pretty soon." Young was not so shy before his own crowd. "No, they won't," said he. "Not until after Saturday's baseball game." "Why not, Young?" he was asked. "What are the procs, anyway?" inquired Barrows, at the foot of the table, who had been Young's champion on the first trip to the canal. He was a small, ingenuous fellow with a big head, and had taken a prize for passing the best entrance examinations from his State. Young was about to laugh and own up that he did not know, when the Junior who ran the club cleared his throat and explained. He was fond of instructing these Freshmen. He had been very green himself two years before, and he knew how it felt. He also knew how impressive an upper-classman seems to the entering student. "The two lower classes," he said, with a great deal of Junior dignity, "always get out proclamations on each other. It is one of the customs. The Sophs generally bring theirs out first; they are like big bill posters." "What's on them?" asked Barrows. "On them is printed a lot of nonsense in green type. They cast aspersions on you, call you fresh and green and heap ignominy on your prominent men and deride your eccentric characters." "Well, where do they put them?" asked the one who brought up the subject. "All over the State." "What!" "They paste them all over this town and its environs, on the blank walls and the sidewalks, and on every barn in the county, on wagons, on telegraph-poles, on freight-cars--not only that, but they go off to Trenton and New Brunswick and paste them all over the town and on freight-trains about to pull out." "Well! what do we do all this time?" asked Young. Everyone was listening now.