Belmont College - Milady in Brown Yearbook (Nashville, TN)

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Physiology is no exception. The bones, muscles, nerves, sinews, the joints and tissues, when we take them apart to study them, are sufficient material for a family of giant brothers. And yet, funny as it may seem, we have to put them all back into one manikin, and he does not seem overcrowded. Besides this, the chapters on hygiene know more about what we should eat and how it should be cooked and digested than Mrs. Rorer. We learn it, and it is all old style and has to be learned over at the next output of the text. But chemistry is simply the most surpassingly funny thing we study. When we get our experiments arranged with test-tube filled, ring-rest, universal clamp, stop-cock, etc., in place and apply the heat; when distillation, sublimation, condensation, combination and separation all begin, we call out — in spite of the fact that we are first year seniors and have graduated in self-control — - Isn ' t it funny! And when the hullabulloo is over and the test-tubes are empty or shattered, the funniest thing is where it all went and what broke the tubes. And so on through the whole curriculum. Even logic, the sage among the sciences, is funny. It proves to us that every cat, even a cat-o ' -nine-tails, has ten tales ; that a fish-pie is a pigeon ; that we cannot possibly get back to chapel because motion is impos- sible; that in all the cycles of the ages, swift-footed Achilles cannot catch the slow-paced tortoise although he is only a rod behind him. No one can deny these are funny conclusions. We sigh for Psychology just for the fun Of knowing the ego and how it (?) goes on; How funny it is! The heart does not love, Nor does the brain think; The nose does no smelling, Eyes can ' t even wink. My inner machinery goes at its call, The funny old ego just does it all. Those of us who take mathematics find plenty of fun there, too. When we study analytics we wonder why even a versatile French genius could not let well enough alone, and why, when there was already one way, a well-explored beaten track to every result that could be desired, he should have hatched out of his fertile brain another method so mixed up of material from every other branch of mathematics that the whole is a web of funny confusion. The fun of analytics is that when you have worked for some time and covered the board with trick} 7 looking characters you may, by comparing your last line with the answer, find them to be somewhat alike. Trigonometry has to do with six very funny functions. These are so constituted that if they are stood on their heads they are not themselves, they are each the other. Each belongs to a variety of masters, but when a different master has one in tow it is not itself, it is some of the others. To describe their relation to each other I would use the words sextuple identity, and that is a funny contradiction itself.

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infirmary for repairs, they slip little notes of sympathy under the door for her to read when she is able, that read about like this: Dear Champ ' : You did splendidly. We are proud of you. It was funny to see how she had to scheme to beat you, and the funniest thing of all was how close a game you played her in spite of her cheating as she did. She cannot write a reply in her present state of delapidation, but she sends the muse to thank them and to be sure to tell them what royal fun it was. But the Athletic Club does not have a monopoly of fun yet awhile. It comes, in a somewhat modified form — I mean with more fighting and less bloodshed — into the class-rooms. The American literature students read Poe ' s tales, the melancholy story of Hepzibah Pyncheon, the lyrics of Sidney Lanier, the hymns of Father Ryan, the wanderings of Evangeline, the Vision of Sir Launfal, Emer- son ' s Essay on Compensation, and declare American literature is fun. Not long since my neighbors were so hilarious they disturbed study hour. When I tapped on the door and reminded them of the fact, they said: Beg your pardon; we did not know we were noisy; we were only laughing at this absurdly funny Chaucer. To show how very funny Shakespeare is to us, I append some remarks very typical of those one can hear at Belmont: It certainly is funny how King Richard kills everybody he likes to kill and nobody arrests him. We are studying Hamlet now, and it is too funny how he goes on about this ghost. One student, devoting herself to the notes, exclaims: It ' s absurd that they think Hamlet is crazy. I knew all the time he was putting on; and another, laboring over Merchant of Venice, said: It certainly is funny to me what Shylock wants with Antonio ' s flesh: I ' d rather give him the money to keep his flesh. Some half-dozen girls in the History Room the other day for reference work, were called in check for their noise, when they replied: We are tearing down Charlemagne ' s empire and it is so much fun. It is the funniest thing in the world how we do in history. We just build up empires and tear them down. We fairly riddled the Papacy about a month ago. The rhetoric students declare rhetoric huge fun, especially writing poetry. I believe the instructor agrees with them that some of the poetry they write is really funny. The geology class declares that the animals of primeval times were extremely funny, with funny teeth, funny eyes, funny habits, and very, very funny names. It is funny to find the solid earth written all over with funny hieroglyphics in stories of times when everything was funny. The Carboniferous Age certainly was funny coal storage, and it is so funny how nice it all turned out for us. Of course physics is funny with its universal laws and fundamental machines. The acrobatic perform- ances the formula; have to go through with to fit the problems are good enough for a side show.

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Geometry has been called the Keystone of the arch of sciences, the perfect science, the simple science, ' and I can add also the funny science. Is it not funny that seeing is believing everywhere else except in geometry? Seeing that two things are equal or unequal, alike or unlike, does not count for a thing in geometry. It was really very funny not long since to see two freshmen at their wit ' s end over a funny problem they found in algebra, where it was said a party of raiders robbed a farmer of half his flock and half a sheep. What, said they, did raiders want with half a sheep, and how did they get it? While there is a modicum of fun for us in our lessons, our recreations have fun for their very essence. One of the best ways to have fun real is to have a Sorority Box Party. We put on our Sunday best, take supper at the Maxwell, and then go to the theater to see Punch and Judy, Humpty Dumpty, Ben Hur, The Man from Mars, or Tannhauser — whatever happens to be on hand. It is all funny alike when one is just having fun. We get in at midnight. Next morning at breakfast we have poor appetites (?) and heavy heads. Our minds are filled with dread of the issues of the day to which we must go unprepared. But funny visions of past fun fill our hearts and ripple out on the heavy atmosphere in rapid conversation and laughter. Or sometimes our quest of fun takes another turn. We get in big farm wagons lined as warm as a spar- row ' s nest with straw, and jolt away over a rough country road a dozen miles. We climb out benumbed and stiff , warm around a big camp fire, toast marshmallows, regale ourselves with sandwiches and black coffee, inter- sperse the feast with raids into the surrounding forest, ride back under the twinkling stars at two o ' clock and fall asleep just in time to wake up for breakfast. We dream of the jolly ' possum hunt we had. We go about for two whole days with heavy eyes and aching limbs, declaring we never had so much fun in all our lives. Or if we walk six miles over the hills, spoil our nice new boots, spend a whole day out of a short vacation, stop at a country store and treat ourselves to a box of stale Uneeda biscuit, get lost and ramble about among the hills till we are too late for supper, and sleep to dream of the blue hills in the misty distance and forget our blistered feet. We say next day as we gaze wistfully out toward Craddock ' s Peak, Oh, it was so much fun; I wish we could go every day. Sometimes when the birds get giddy and sing and trill and coax too much we take a book to read and spend the afternoon under the shadows of the cedar lane, while the birds carol and chirp above our heads as though having called us out they must entertain us. We forget or lose ourselves in fun and get back just in time to miss the bell. We get a tardy mark after our fair names and lose one of our golden four hundreds, but we can ' t weep and wail over what gave us so much fun. If it snows, as snow it does at Belmont sometimes, we get our friends together as quickly as possible ; we make up a party and order a sleigh to get a ride before the snow goes. The sleigh comes. We hear the bells tinkling merrily and the soft echoes on the chilly air. We see the white steeds. We get in. We go merrily down the hill. We find the snow has become slush. The horses balk. The sleigh breaks. We get out and wade