the old tree; bubbling up on each other’s shoulders into momentary prominence and prospect of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—­to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments.  It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men would but confine themselves to such rowdyism as may be looked at and laughed at by their mothers and sisters, they would find life just as amusing and a thousand times more pure and profitable.

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It occurs to me here that there is one subject on which I desire to “give my views,” though it is quite unconnected with Class-Day.  But it is probable that in the whole course of my natural life it will never again happen to me to be writing about colleges, so I desire to say in this paper everything I have to say on the subject.  I refer to the practice of “hazing,” which is an abomination.  If we should find it among hinds, a remnant of the barbarisms of the Dark Ages, blindly handed down by such slow-growing people as go to mill with their meal on one side of the saddle and a stone on the other to balance, as their fathers did, because it never occurred to their loggerheads to divide the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should not be surprised; but hazing occurs among boys who have been accustomed to the circulation of ideas, boys old enough and intelligent enough to understand the difference between brutality and frolic, old enough to know what honor and courage mean, and therefore I cannot conceive how they should countenance a practice which entirely ignores and defies honor, and whose brutality has not a single redeeming feature.  It has neither wisdom nor wit, no spirit, no genius, no impulsiveness, scarcely the mirth of boyish frolic.  A narrow range of stale practical jokes, lighted up by no gleam of originality, is transmitted from year to year with as much fidelity as the Hebrew Bible, and not half the latitude allowed to clergymen of the English Established Church.  But besides its platitude, its one overpowering and fatal characteristic is its intense and essential cowardice.  Cowardice is its head and front and bones and blood.  One boy does not single out another boy of his own weight, and take his chances in a fair stand-up fight.  But a party of Sophomores club together in such numbers as to render opposition useless, and pounce upon their victim unawares, as Brooks and his minions pounced upon Sumner, and as the Southern chivalry is given to doing.  For sweet pity’s sake, let this mode of warfare be monopolized by the Southern chivalry.