When we came away from the freshmen’s match, the charming roads of the town, bordered by trees and by the agreeable architecture of mysterious clubs, were beginning to be alive and dangerous with automobiles and carriages, and pretty girls and proud men, and flags and flowers, and colored favors and shoutings.  Salutes were being exchanged at every yard.  The sense of a mighty and culminating event sharpened the air.  The great inn was full of jollity and excitement, and the reception-clerks thereof had the negligent mien of those who know that every bedroom is taken and every table booked.  The club (not one of the mysterious ones, but an ingenuous plain club of patriarchs who had once been young in the university and were now defying time) was crammed with amiable confusion, and its rich carpets protected for the day against the feet of bald lads, who kept aimlessly walking up-stairs and down-stairs and from room to room, out of mere friendly exuberance.

And after the inn and the club I was conducted into a true American home, where the largest and most free hospitality was being practised upon a footing of universal intimacy.  You ate standing; you ate sitting; you ate walking the length of the long table; you ate at one small table, and then you ate at another.  You talked at random to strangers behind and strangers before.  And when you couldn’t think of anything to say, you just smiled inclusively.  You knew scarcely anybody’s name, but the heart of everybody.  Impossible to be ceremonious!  When a young woman bluntly inquired the significance of that far-away look in your eye, impossible not to reply frankly that you were dreaming of a second helping of a marvelous pie up there at the end of the long table; and impossible not to eat all the three separate second helpings that were instantly thrust upon you!  The chatter and the good-nature were enormous.  This home was an expression of the democracy of the university at its best.  Fraternity was abroad; kindliness was abroad; and therefore joy.  Whatever else was taught at the university, these were taught, and they were learnt.  If a publicist asked me what American civilization had achieved, I would answer that among other things it had achieved this hour in this modest home.

Occasionally a face would darken and a voice grow serious, exposing the terrible secret apprehensions, based on expert opinion, that the home side could not win.  But the cloud would pass.  And occasionally there would be a reference to the victim whose muddy boots I had seen.  “Dreadful, isn’t it?” and a twinge of compassion for the victim or for his mother!  But the cloud would immediately pass.

And then we all had to leave, for none must be late on this solemn and gay occasion.  And now the roads were so many converging torrents of automobiles and carriages, and excitement had developed into fever.  Life was at its highest, and the world held but one problem ...  Sign that reaction was approaching!