Colby Stories (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HO IV WALLY WENT TO THE FIRE A story about my college days? Well, let me see; did I ever tell you how Wally went to the fire? You've heard me speak of Walsing- ham, ?he was a round-checked, dapper little man, who always dressed well, always met the world with a smile, and always did everything in quite an appropriate and regular manner. One night, however, chance or long habit led him to dress his part too faithfully, and-?but I 'll begin at the beginning. 'T was the night of the annual night-shirt parade, which is never premeditated, and never announced, and always happens spontaneously once a year. It had been a stifling day, somewhere about the middle of June, and even at midnight was decidedly warm. The heat and the impossibility of sleeping, and the restlessness that marks the end of the college year, had made us all uneasy that evening, and those who had gone to bed were wondering why theyhad done so. All at once someone in the group still lingering on the steps of South College exclaimed, ' Let's have a night-shirt parade ' The suggestion was enough; the others took up the cry, shouts and horn-blasts roused the inmates of the dormitories, and in fifteen minutes the whole college was out. Even Billy ' Grinds' was there with his eye-shade over his forehead?the man who stayed in from the baseball games to study Greek. His real name was Grimes, and it was a disputed point whether he wore his eye-shade to bed or not. Every man wore a night-shirt over his clothes, every man had a tin horn, and every man was an officer and told the others what to do. In spite of this last difficulty the lines were soon formed, and our white clad procession, ghostly to the eye, and anything but ghostly to the ear, tooted and. shouted and sang its way through the principal streets of ...