AFTER the Freshmen had departed on their ride, the Sophomores quickly gathered together in the lecture room of Williston Hall, closed the doors tightly, and deliberated. The predominant feeling of the occasion was enmity -- supreme enmity for the "Freshies" -- and the meeting was conducted in whispers and informally.
There was a little clique of girls in the class who held 1907 at heart and trampled everything else. They were fiery and bitter, as exacting of the newcomers as they themselves had been thoughtless and forward when in their places. One of these girls was Edith Brewster, and these ruled the meeting.
"Why, girls, think to what extent these Freshmen have gone!" cried one. "They have no sense of anybody's rights or any Senior deference."
"When we were Freshmen," put in another Sophomore, "we had to toe the mark. And we knew better than to rush headlong into things like this."
"I never saw such nerve!"
"What they need is a good lesson," said Edith, "and it's up to us to give it to them. The Seniors would not step down from their dignity to do it, and it's right that they shouldn't. But I know that they are dreadfully put out. It is our duty as a sister class to defend their rights and fight for the Seniors when they are insulted."
" Good for you, Edith," came from the other side. "We shall defend them. But how?"
"We might have a wholesale topsy-turvy party to-night," was suggested, "while the Freshies are away."
"Not when the Freshmen are unprepared and don't expect it! That would be very small and the Faculty would be down on us for it. You know they have been objecting to that sort of thing for a long time."
"Let's telephone to Belchertown that they are not coming and not to get the supper ready. It would be two hours before the Freshmen reached there and found things wrong."
"Oh, no!" was protested. "That would only be mean, and not a bit like us."
"No," put in another, "what we want to do is something dignified -- give them a solemn reminder and warning, without stepping down from our position."
"The very thing!" cried Edith. "We will draw up a set of appropriate rules and mail them to the Freshmen."
" Better still," said another of the "spitfires," "let us make up a set of commands and have them printed, poster form, and post them round the campus."
The suggestion tickled the humor of the rest of the Sophomores and was adopted unanimously. The committee appointed took paper and pencil and began to draw up rules from suggestions right then and there. From serious, the nature of the meeting degenerated to comic. Plans were made to visit the printer in Holyoke the next day, and the details of the conspiracy were left to the fertile brains of the committee, of which the clique just mentioned constituted the majority.
The rest of the class pledged to hold themselves in readiness for the first call, and to go out with the signal.
Nothing was whispered in public about the great affair. The Freshmen were next day greeted with no unusual disdain, but an extra coating of pleasantness was put on to hide the fact that the cake was badly burnt underneath.
The Seniors took their proper sleigh ride before the week was out. Then it snowed again and made it splendid for the Juniors, who went on the Tuesday night of the week following. The Sophomores, too, were planning; but they were interested in their conspiracy more than in their ride.
By this time the posters were done and the committee went down to Holyoke one afternoon, and fetched them under their coats, secretly. Then the signal was posted on the bulletin boards.
It was past one o'cock that night, when the two watchmen, swinging their lanterns that threw long streaks of light across the white snow, met from opposite directions on the path in front of Mary Lyon Hall.
"Say, Jim," said Mr. Dodge, who had come from the south campus, "there's something funny going on in the halls."
"What's the trouble?" asked Halloway, putting down his lantern and beating his hands together to warm them.
"Why, there's been lights lit, here and there, in the students' rooms. Come and see. If it was one or two, I wouldn't think anything of it. But it's a whole lot in nearly every hall, and hadn't ought to be."
"Do you suppose there's any funny business going on?" asked Halloway, taking up his lantern again and plodding along beside Dodge. "Tain't examinations, is it?"
"Naw, I shouldn't think so -- yet," said Dodge. "There's two weeks more for that, and they don't generally get up nights to study, so wholesale like, except during the week of exams."
They made their way to the gymnasium, which commanded a pretty good general view of the dormitories. There were lights in Porter, Safford, and Mary Brigham. Mead contributed a few more; and, although they presented a side view and the lights themselves were invisible, there were white glows on the snow from the windows in Rockefeller and Wilder. Pearsons was on the other side of the street and invisible.
"It's mighty funny, let me telI you," said Mr. Dodge, who had served on the college staff since he was a boy, and had been petted and made much of by the young ladies of that earlier period. "I just can't get it all through my noddle."
Just then the clock began to strike two, and the watchmen saw the lights in the dormitories, one after another, go out.
"That's funnier yet," whispered Halloway. "It looks like a signal -- them lights out."
"Well, let's put our lights out, too, to be in the fashion," said Mr. Dodge. "We'll be surer to discover anything queer going on without being seen ourselves."
They blew out their lanterns, and stepped inside the vestibule of the gymnasium. In a moment the spring of an opening door creaked at Wilder, and soft footsteps made the frozen piazza steps crack. Several dark figures passed up the path toward the grove. A first-floor window was raised in Porter, and several forms dropped out on the snow and met the Wilder delegation. More and more were stealing from every direction and going toward the grove.
"Looks like a surunade," whispered Halloway, cautiously putting out his head.
"No! Not in cold weather like this. It's something different than that to bring all those crazy girls out of their beds. Let's creep up from the other side of Porter and see what they're up to."
It was a busy scene Messrs. Dodge and Halloway came upon. This congregation of phantoms were distributing long, unwieldy sheets of crackling paper and whispering in ecstatic undertones. Willing hands dipped sundry whisk brooms (as improvised brushes) into pails of paste (made from smuggled flour and water) and were posting up the paper signs. The smaller and more agile girls got up on the backs of others and, a whisk-broomful of paste being handed up to them, they put up the posters and stuck them where they would be out of reach of desecrating hands.
"They can't tear them down from here," they said confidently.
Posters were stuck on Porter and the white birches in the grove, on Safford, Mary Lyon, and Brigham. The other halls were visited and likewise placarded, as were also the asphalt paths where the snow had been cleared. Even the Pepper Box was visited by some more venturesome spirits, and gay posters stuck to the floor and the steps.
The two watchmen were beside themselves; for they knew that such midnight doings would not bear the light of day. But they followed the girls silently, satisfied for the present to see that no harm came to them. When, the posters having given out, the last of the girls stole off chuckling to bed, they quickly betook themselves to the superintendent's house, woke that official out of a sound sleep, and told him what they had witnessed.
The superintendent at once called up the college President on the 'phone. But there was little need to inform her. She, having sat up long over an address and gone to bed late, had been attracted by suspicious footsteps and creaking of stairs, and had seen, from the Faculty parlor windows in the back, the Brigham contingent go out by the kitchen door. She wakened the matron and consulted her as to the cause of the back-door exodus, and in the end had that door locked and the front door opened, while she lighted the lamp in her study and waited anxiously for the return of the culprits.
As the Sophomores came tiptoeing back, exuberant, in the course of an hour, the President met them in the hall. There was a peculiar look in her eyes, more sad than stern, and she said to them:
"Girls, when you leave the house, it is more honorable to go through the front door than the rear. I should like to see you all in my room to-morrow, and anybody else who has been out with you to-night. Good night."
The girls went up to their rooms, sheepish and crestfallen. They went to bed, but not to sleep, worrying and tossing about until exhaustion overcame them in the first hours of the morning.
Meanwhile, the telephone told the President what had been on foot, and the superintendent was instructed to have taken down as many of the offending posters as possible before daybreak.
All but the Brighamites were expecting a great day of it, and had gone to bed without being disillusioned. But, by breakfast, the news was sent by the Brigham Sophomores to them, and by the time the Freshmen or the other upperclassmen had found out anything about it, there was "weeping and gnashing of teeth"; the Sophomores' pudding had turned sour; they were hoist with their own petard.
It is true that the superintendent's men had overlooked a poster stuck to a tree in the grove and another at the back of Mary Lyon Hall; of the others there remained only green-painted shreds stuck fast on brick or asphalt. In front of these two a swarm of Freshmen, with a sprinkling from the upper classes intermingled, were gleefully devouring the contents; and this is what they read:
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Read and Obey the LAW Prepared for the Improvement of your MINDS, MORALS, and MANNERS!
BEWARE, FRESHMEN, BEWARE!!
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For these few remarks that had afforded the Freshmen so much amusement rather than chastisement, the Sophomores paid dearly. Almost the entire class had been out on the midnight campus rally, and the proclamation of the President reached more widely than she ever dreamed it would. Besides the Brigham party, the participants were all unknown to her, and yet the teary and uneasy groups that whispered together in the corridors, were going to their punishment of their own volition.
All morning long, a stream of Sophomores went into the President's parlor, first singly, then, as the numbers hopelessly increased, collectively. There were fears of expulsion and suspension; worse yet, there was the President's displeasure -- a thing they would not have occasioned for the wide world; still worse, there was the humiliation of the class before the Freshmen, the very people they wished to awe and punish!
Let us not examine too closely into what the President said to them. They came out with tearful but smiling eyes and a groan in their hearts. The President realized that the affair of last night was merely a thoughtless folly with never an idea of ill-intention in it; the willingness with which they, unknown, came to surrender themselves, like children to be punished, was enough to make her pardon them. Any other punishment for so complete a total was out of the question. Their humiliation before the college was sufficient, and what she said to make them cry only endeared her the more.
Their spirits were sadly tamed, and all day long when they met Freshmen, they turned the other way and avoided speaking, even to friends.