After she left, I said good-night. It’s awfully late, and I have to get
up early, to be in time to register.
I wonder who he is. I hope he didn’t think I was fresh. I don’t
believe he did, though, for as I was going he said,—
"We ’re such near neighbors, you must drop in when you haven’t anything
better to do."
Mamma’s train must have passed Utica by this time.
*II*
Well, I ’ve learned a lot of things during the past week, that are n’t
advertised in the catalogue. If I ’ve neglected to make a note of them
until now, it has been my misfortune, and not my fault.
We registered on Wednesday morning—Freshmen have to register the day
before college really opens—and I confess I was a little disappointed at
the informal way such an important act of one’s life is done. In the
first place, as you can drop in any time between nine A.M. and one P.M.,
you don’t see the whole class together. Then the room we registered in
might have been in the High School at home. I don’t know what I
expected exactly, but it certainly was n’t a bare, square room, a desk
on a low platform, some plaster casts, and a lot of plain wooden chairs
arranged in rows on an inclined plane. However, when I think the matter
over, I don’t see what else they could have.
A dissatisfied-looking little man with a red necktie sat reading a
newspaper at the desk when I went in, and near him—reading a book—was a
younger fellow who looked as if he might be a student. There were piles
of registration cards on the desk, and after I had stood there a moment,
not knowing what to do, the little man looked up absently from his
paper, handed me some cards with a feeble sort of gesture, and murmured
in a melancholy, slightly trembling, and very sarcastic voice,—
"... This gentleman is come to me
With commendation from great potentates,
And here he means to spend his time awhile."
Then he yawned, and took up the paper again. The young man, without
apparently thinking this remark in the least odd, closed his book on his
thumb so as not to lose the place, and gave me another card, saying in a
perfectly businesslike voice,—
"Please fill this one out, too." I sat down at a bench to write, and
just then five or six other fellows came in. One of them was the
good-looking chap (with the pretty mother) who rooms in the same house
with me. I hadn’t seen him since the day I signed my lease. I listened
to hear if the little man at the desk would spring anything weird on
them; but as they went right up to him, and took cards as if they knew
all about it, and retreated to the back of the room, he didn’t have
time. They talked and laughed a good deal, and once they got into a
scuffle, but the instructors didn’t even glance up. I finished
answering the questions on my cards, and was reading them over, when one
of the fellows behind me said,—
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