THE Salad days of the college career -- so brimming with spirits and full of health, so free of thoughtful reasoning, so overabundant in self-confidence -- are among the best remembered of a lifetime. It is of these days I am going to tell the reader, and bring back scenes that never grow old. For the history of Freshman worries only repeats itself, and may happen over and again in different guises.
And yet, for the benefit of those who know Mount Holyoke College now for the first time, and for those who have known it long and might take this volume as a serious and faithful history, I must say that the various incidents related here are only the theme of the fictionist, and though in part founded on fact, are altered and expanded for the entertainment of young readers. Difficulties between Sophomore and Freshman are seldom heard of now. Those attentions which Sophomores once paid to the newly entered are no more the custom. They were long since abolished at Mount Holyoke, even earlier than I credit in my story. The "manly " cheering, too, will echo no more around the walls of Alma Mater. Its doing away was a voluntary sacrifice of the students to womanliness -- through the pervading influence of the head of the college -- and other overspirited customs have gone with it. Except for such slight differences, the college of yesterday is the college of to-day, and in my story the past as I found it is reconciled with the present as I left it.
But girls are everywhere and always the same. So for what my Freshmen do and say and feel, I hardly need to ask indulgence. They are healthy American girls and cannot do otherwise. Their indiscretions they will outgrow, for they are in the transition period between preparatory school and college when they are just awaking to the seriousness of work. After all--they are only Freshmen.
C. C., '03.