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“Gosh! talk about Turkish baths!” gurgled the big victim, as they were sousing him for the final time in the tub of hot soap-suds. “I’ll say this beats ’em a mile high! Wait till we got those Soffies at the bridge! I’m goin’ to take a stick along and notch it every time I put one of ’em to sleep.”

“Well?” said Dick to Larry, after they had tucked the cheerful victim into his bed, and were once more in their own room, “changed your mind any?”

“Not a minute’s worth!” was the gruff reply. “It’s all tom-foolishness, and I don’t want any of it in mine.”

“But you’ll turn out for the bridge scrap, won’t you?—for the honor of the class?”

“Not so you could notice it,” Larry refused; and with that he stuck his face into a book.

For some days the “shaking-down” process which every college has to go through at the beginning of the scholastic year went on—with small satisfaction to any sober-minded member of the faculty, or to fellows who, like Larry Donovan, were not yet imbued with that elusive thing called “college spirit.” Hazings, some of them mild, and some not so mild, went on nightly. Freshmen, unwarily out after dark in numbers too small for defense, were paddled, painted, and made to do stunts ridiculous, and sometimes rather harrowing.