



Produced by Al Haines.





                               THE DIARY
                            _of a_ FRESHMAN


                                  _By_

                        CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU

                      Author of "Harvard Episodes"



                               _NEW YORK_
                      DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY
                               _MDCCCCI_




                         _Copyright, 1900, by_
                       The Curtis Publishing Co.

                         _Copyright, 1901, by_
                       Doubleday, Page & Company



                            University Press
                          John Wilson and Son
                           Cambridge, U.S.A.




                                _TO THE_
                "_For Ever Panting and For Ever Young._"




                   _Courteous acknowledgment is here
                      made to the Saturday Evening
                   Post, Philadelphia, in which these
                      papers first saw the light._




                                _*THE*_*
                       DIARY *_*of a*_* FRESHMAN*



                                  *I*


Mamma left for home this afternoon.  As I want to be perfectly truthful
in my diary, I suppose I must confess that before she actually went away
I sometimes thought I should be rather relieved when she was no longer
here. Mamma has a fixed idea that I came to college for the express
purpose of getting my feet wet by day, and sleeping in a draught by
night. She began the furnishing of my rooms by investing in a pair of
rubber boots,--the kind you tie around your waist with a string.  The
clerk in the shop asked her if I was fond of trout-fishing, and she
explained to him that I had always lived in the West where the climate
was dry, and that she didn't know how I would stand the dampness of the
seacoast.  Mamma thought the clerk was so interested in my last attack
of tonsillitis I didn't have the heart to tell her that all the time he
was looking sympathetic with his right eye, he was winking at me with
his left.

Now that she is gone, however, I don't see how I could have thought,
even for a moment, that I should be glad, and I've been sitting here
for an hour just looking at my room and all the nice things she advised
me about and helped me to choose--wishing she could see how cosey it is
late at night with the green lamp lighted and a little fire going.  (It
isn't really cool enough for a fire; I had to take my coat off for a
while, the room got so warm--but I was anxious to know how the andirons
looked with a blaze behind them.) I suppose she is lying awake in the
sleeping-car thinking of me.  She made me move my bed to the other side
of the room, so that it wouldn't be near the window.  I moved it back
again; but I think now I 'll change it again to the way she liked it.

Of course I was disappointed last May when I found I hadn't drawn a room
in one of the college buildings.  I had an idea that if you didn't live
in one of the buildings owned by the college you wouldn't feel,
somehow, as if you "belonged."  Before I arrived in Cambridge I worried
a good deal over it.  The old Harvard men at home were most
unsatisfactory about this when I asked their advice. The ones who had
lived in the Yard when they were in college seemed to think there was
n't any particular use in going to college at all unless you could live
either in their old rooms or some in the same building; and the ones who
had lived outside as I am going to do (this year, anyhow) said the
college buildings were nice enough in their way, but if I could only get
the dear old place (which was pulled down fifteen years ago) where James
Russell Lowell had scratched his name on the window-pane, and where
somebody else (I've forgotten who it was) crawled up the big chimney
when the sheriff came to arrest him for debt and was discovered because
he did not crawl far enough, I should be all right.

I don't see how the good times and the advantages of a place like this
hold out for so long; everybody who has been here speaks as if he had
about used them up.

Well, we found rooms pleading to be rented; every other house in
Cambridge has a "Student's Room to Let" card in the window.  Even some
of the rooms in the Yard had been given up at the last minute by fellows
who flunked their exams.  Mamma said she felt very sorry for the poor
boys; and after that the enormity of my having been conditioned in
physics and solid geometry decreased considerably.  The trouble (there
were four days full of it) wasn't in finding a good place, but in trying
to decide on some one place.  For a while it looked as though I should
either have to live in five separate houses--some of them over a mile
apart--or give up going to college.  We dragged up and down all the
quiet side streets within a reasonable distance of the Yard, ringing
bells and asking questions until the words "I should like to look at"
and "What is the price of?" began to sound like some kind of a silly
English Meisterschaft system. Several times when we were very tired we
wandered by mistake into houses we had been to