And then, of course, there was the institution of the practical joke. On April 1st there was soap in the pie. If you got in late to a meal, it was wise to brush your chair and “pick your bites,” if any bites were left. If not, there was no telling what you might swallow or sit on. More than once I tasted salt in my water and pepper in my biscuits. I seemed to have been marked from the first as a fit subject for these pranks. On Hallowe’en a squad of cadets commanded by a corporal entered my room and ordered me to get into my uniform, shoulder my gun, and proceed to the gymnasium, which, according to the order read, the commandant assigned me to guard against stragglers. I guarded through a whole uneventful night. Toward morning the captain of the football team, who had a room in the gymnasium, returned from a party. I ordered him to halt and give the password. He smiled and tried to enter. I made a lunge for him, and would have run my bayonet through him if he had not begun to laugh. “Go on home, you poor boy,” he said. “They pull that stunt off every year. Poor joke, I think.” The next day my table-mates tried to jolly me about it. They said I would be court-martialed as a deserter from duty. I got angry, and that made them all the more hilarious. Then a great, strapping fellow named Harvey spoke up. “Be still, you galoots,” he said to them; and then to me, “For gosh sake, fellow, be human!” I tried a long time to figure out what he meant by “human,” and for the rest of my college career I strove to follow his advice. It was the first real hint I had got on what America, through her representatives in Missouri, was expecting of me. Harvey became my first American friend. THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT So to New York I went, and lived through the last and the bitterest episode in the romance of readjustment. During that whole strenuous year, while I was fighting my battle for America, I had never for a moment stopped to figure the price it was costing me. I had not dreamed that my mere going to Missouri had opened up a gulf between me and the world I had come from, and that every step I was taking toward my ultimate goal was a stride away from everything that had once been mine, that had once been myself. Now, no sooner had I alighted from the train than it came upon me with a pang that that one year out there had loosened ties that I had imagined were eternal.