University of the South - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Sewanee, TN)

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2o ©tje ©ap anb xvm. has been known to be heady, it has to be dashed with common sense to keep it from being too intoxicating as well as to make it palatable to others. A person who has taken his Sewanee spirit, in large quantities, straight, is as likely as not to imitate the jeweler in Browning ' s poem, with the nightmare, name and cast himself off the battlements. When you have gone to the library to consult the fourth volume of Bancroft, and found that it has been missing for ten years, when your favorite Hardees or Sewanees have lost the championship, when you hear that Mr. So and So has said that Sewanee is too High Church for him, when you have been asked for a subscription to help one of the literary societies out of debt, when to crown all you hear that your name has been bandied about by Mrs. Grundy and two of her intimate friends, then you feel that the Sewanee spirit which prevents you from at once packing your trunk is a disease more felt than elephantiasis or the chewing gum habit. But when you sit quietly down and study Sewanee ' s history from the documents , when you compare a photograph of the first chapel with the new Walsh building, when you think of the men and women who have given their prayers and their lives to built Sewanee up, when you see in your mind ' s eye Bishop Quintard planting the cross in the midst of the virgin woods, when you see Faculty and Students working in harmony to develop a great University, when you see the interest that every man, woman and boy takes in a Sewanee Athletic victory, when you see the merits of his air castle in the full belief that he will reach the hard, bare ground of real facts with limbs unbroken and breath unspent. These are the ' people who con- sole themselves when our base ball nine goes off and gets beaten , by remark- ing, well, the boys certainly looked nice, didn ' t they? These same people also arrive at a public lecture half an hour late and wonder why the lecturer ' s face is not wreathed in smiles at their advent. They are disgusted too, if you cannot make up your mind the moment you get off the train whether to be a Sewanee or a Hardee. They are simply horror struck when you suggest that a Lyman medal contest is slightly wearisome. But what is this Sewanee spirit after all ? asks the impatient reader. Cela depend, dear reader, that depends upon — well, upon the digestion of the person rash enough to undertake to give you an answer. The Sewanee spirit sometimes appears to be a disease, sometimes an inspiration. When you

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he gtenmnee gtjnrtt This is not a ghost story or a prohibition tract. There is said to be a Sewanee spirit that haunts the park to the terror of small boys, with or with- out gowns. There is also a Sewanee spirit, known sometimes as mountain dew, which never saw a revenue officer, but which scents the breeze on Saturday afternoons when the covite who has disposed of his apples and chickens rides homeward among his peers. Of neither of these spirits is it our purpose to treat here. The Sewanee spirit to which we refer has however one quality in common with the spirit whose coming and going gives the member s of the Society for Psychical Research a reason for existing. It is used as a bugaboo. Not to scare children, however, but to impress our visitors. When the summer visitor is disposed to be naughty, i. e., when he or she becomes critical and suggests that we Sewanee folks think more of our new chapel fence than of the strike at Homestead, or that we have improved the Italian proverb into See Sewanee and die, we immediately floor our impertinent critic with the remark, Why, that is the Sewanee Spirit. When this mysterious ghostly entity is first invoked, the Philistine from the valley is apt to smile in a superior manner and to wonder whether among the various institutions installed upon the Cumberland Plateau, the Monteagles, the Fairmounts, the Sewanees, there is not one roomy, well-conducted lunatic asylum to be found. When it is invoked a second time, perhaps by a sober and grave professor, the Philistine becomes a little non-plussed. When the Professor ' s wife chirpily trots out the venerable aparition, non-plussage gives place to surplussage of wonder, when finally the summer girl of two years ' standing, and the grammer school boy who heads the choir evoke this same spirit from the vasty deeps of Hodgson ' s Pond, the Philistine is subdued, he meditates suicide, the buga- boo has worked like a charm. The Sewanee spirit to which we refer has also one quality in common with the spirit which sends the happy covite riding homeward with his body at anything but a right angle to his horse. When taken in large quantities it

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he ( ap attb (faoxvxx. 21 have had dyspepsia for a week, when ten days of November weather have been transported bodily into the middle of July, when you have stumbled over four several cows and eighteen several roots in endeavoring to reach your lodg- ings on a dark night, when you have gone to hear the bell ring itself hoarse because the Vice Chancellor has refused another call, when year by year you perceive that more scholarly work is being done in the several schools and that new departments are being added, when you find that neither absence nor years can dim the devotion of a single alumnus to his alma mater, when you see in your dreams the splendid group of Academic buildings completed, when to crown all you feel in your heart of hearts that your little mite of work is being done in God ' s service when it is being done for Sewanee, then you feel that the Sewanee spirit that has taken hold of you and will not let you go, is an inspiration and a joy forever — then you feel that not to appre- ciate that spirit is barely to be tolerated in a Philistine and to jest about it an offence that would be unpardonable in anyone save a Joco-SERiuS.