There was a craze of skylarking the first few weeks after the school opened.  Almost every day one of the Lakerimmers would come back from his classes to find his room “stacked”—­a word that exactly expresses its meaning.  There is something particularly discouraging in going to your room late in the evening, your mind made up to a comfortable hour of reading on a divan covered with cushions made by your best girls, only to find the divan placed in the middle of the bed, with a bureau and a bookcase stuck on top of it, a few chairs and a pet bulldog tied in the middle of the mix-up, and a mirror and a well-filled bowl of water so fixed on the top of the heap that it is well-nigh impossible to move any one of the articles without cracking the looking-glass or dousing yourself with the water.  The Lakerimmers tried retaliation for a time; but the pleasure of stacking another man’s room was not half so great as the misery of unstacking one’s own room, and they finally decided to keep two or three of the men always on guard in the building.

There was a rage for hazing, too, the first few weeks; and as the Lakerimmers were all new men in the Academy, they were considered particularly good candidates for various degrees of torment.  Hazing was strictly against the rules of the Academy, but the teachers could not be everywhere at once, and had something to do besides prowl around the dark corners of the campus at all hours of the night.  Some of the men furiously resisted the efforts to haze them; but when they once learned that their efforts were vain, and had perforce to submit, none of them were mean enough to peach on their tormentors after the damage was done.  The Lakerimmers, however, decided to resist force with force, and stuck by each other so closely, and barricaded their doors so firmly at night, when they must necessarily separate, that time went on without any of them being subjected to any other indignities than the guying of the other Kingstonians.

Sawed-Off had so much and such hard work to do after school hours that the whole Academy respected him too much to attempt to haze him, though he roomed alone in the old Middle College.  Besides, his size was such that nobody cared to be the first one to lay hand on him.

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There was just one blot on the happiness of the Dozen at Kingston.  Tug and Punk and Jumbo had started the whole migration from Lakerim because they had been invited by the Kingston Athletic Association to join forces with the Academy.  The magnificent game of football these three men had played in the last two years had been the cause of this invitation, and they had come with glowing dreams of new worlds to conquer.  What was their pain and disgust to find that the captain of the Kingston team, elected before they came, had decided that he had good cause for jealousy of Tug, and had decided that, since Tug would probably win all his old laurels away from him if he once admitted him to the eleven, the only way to retain those laurels was to keep Tug off the team.  When the Lakerim three, therefore, appeared on the field as candidates for the eleven, they were assigned to the second or scrub team. (The first team was generally called the “varsity,” though of course it only represented an academy.)