Just then the chapel bell clanged, and the professor exclaimed: 

“Bless me! we’ll be late if we’re not careful!”

Away he hurried.

Frank and Harry followed him, and as they went along Harry expressed his feelings forcibly and violently.

“How dare you howl before me?” laughed Frank.

“Excuse me,” said Rattleton.  “I didn’t know you wanted to howl first.”

At chapel Harry felt that the eyes of everybody were upon him.  He kept one hand up to his face as much as possible, but he saw the sophomores smiling covertly and winking among themselves.  He longed to get even; that was his one burning ambition and desire.

When the service was over the freshmen stood and bowed to the faculty as they passed out.  They were supposed to keep bowing to the seniors, juniors and sophomores, but that custom had long been a dead letter at Yale.  The freshmen had become too independent for such a thing.

However, they stood and saw the upper classmen go past, and it seemed to poor Harry that every fellow stared at him and grinned.  The sophs added to his misery and anger by winking at him, and Tad Horner ventured to go through a swift pantomime of taking a scalp.

“Oh, I am liable to have yours yet,” thought Harry.

On their way back to their rooms Harry and Frank were greeted by all sorts of calls and persiflage from the sophomores, who had gathered in knots to watch them pass.

This sort of chaffing gave Rattleton “that tired feeling,” as he expressed it, and by the time they reached their room he was in a desperate mood.

“I’ll get even!” he vowed, fiercely.  “I’ll do it.”

“Go ahead—­you can do it,” laughed Frank.  “You can do anybody.”

Then Harry flung a book at him, which Frank skillfully caught and returned with the utmost politeness.

At breakfast Rattleton was chafed by the freshmen, and he boiled more than ever.

“Somebody has my coat, vest, hat, shirt and undershirt,” he said as he thought the affair over.  “I had to go home in a linen duster which I got down to Billy’s last night.  I don’t care so much for the clothes I lost, but I’d like to know who has ’em.  I’d sue him!”

But after breakfast an expressman appeared with a bundle for Rattleton, and in the bundle were the missing articles.

The sophomores were jubilant, and they taunted the freshmen.  They said the fate that had befallen Rattleton was simply a warning.  It was nothing beside what might happen.

For the time the freshmen were forced to remain silent, but they felt that the sophomores had not evened up matters by any means.  And the affair would not be dropped.

During the afternoon of that day it rained for at least two hours, and it did not clear up and let the sun out, so there was plenty of dirt and mud at nightfall.

Then it was that Rattleton some way found out that a number of sophomores who dined at a club on York Street were going to attend a party that evening.  It was to be a swell affair on Temple Street, and the sophs were certain to wear their dress suits.