“They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon this whole region ’peared to have a blue flush about it.  There must have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you never heard.  Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him.  They examined the house all over, too.  The door was standing half open, and at last one old jay happened to go and light on it and look in.  Of course, that knocked the mystery galley-west in a second.  There lay the acorns, scattered all over the floor..  He flopped his wings and raised a whoop.  ‘Come here!’ he says, ’Come here, everybody; hang’d if this fool hasn’t been trying to fill up a house with acorns!’ They all came a-swooping down like a blue cloud, and as each fellow lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him home and he fell over backward suffocating with laughter, and the next jay took his place and done the same.

“Well, sir, they roosted around here on the housetop and the trees for an hour, and guffawed over that thing like human beings.  It ain’t any use to tell me a bluejay hasn’t got a sense of humor, because I know better.  And memory, too.  They brought jays here from all over the United States to look down that hole, every summer for three years.  Other birds, too.  And they could all see the point except an owl that come from Nova Scotia to visit the Yo Semite, and he took this thing in on his way back.  He said he couldn’t see anything funny in it.  But then he was a good deal disappointed about Yo Semite, too.”

Chapter IV
Student Life
[The Laborious Beer King]

The summer semester was in full tide; consequently the most frequent figure in and about Heidelberg was the student.  Most of the students were Germans, of course, but the representatives of foreign lands were very numerous.  They hailed from every corner of the globe—­for instruction is cheap in Heidelberg, and so is living, too.  The Anglo-American Club, composed of British and American students, had twenty-five members, and there was still much material left to draw from.

Nine-tenths of the Heidelberg students wore no badge or uniform; the other tenth wore caps of various colors, and belonged to social organizations called “corps.”  There were five corps, each with a color of its own; there were white caps, blue caps, and red, yellow, and green ones.  The famous duel-fighting is confined to the “corps” boys.  The “Kneip” seems to be a specialty of theirs, too.  Kneips are held, now and then, to celebrate great occasions, like the election of a beer king, for instance.  The solemnity is simple; the five corps assemble at night, and at a signal they all fall loading themselves with beer, out of pint-mugs, as fast as possible,