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

Page 20 text:

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

Page 19 text:

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.

Page 21 text:

back to the college. Our paper soles are wet, our purses are depleted, our chance of a sleigh ride gone with the beautiful snow, but we tell it down the coming years — the unparalleled fun of our Belmont sleigh ride. But fun has grades and shades of difference. I think I have, in discussing fun, arranged it in climatic order. Now, away up near the topmost rounds of fun is the process of initiation. The funniest part about it is the way we love our frat. sisters and the fun we have in torturing them. When they are being served they think it is a queer turn for love to take, but it seems the most natural thing in the world when they begin to help us take in the others. We always select the most spirited girls we can find and pin them. Breaking them in is so much fun. If a girl is real vain and takes considerable pride in a lofty pompadour, we level her by lowering it. We plait her hair in dozens of little thin strings, tie a big flimsy bow of incongruous color on each one and send her to the desk on an errand. How we chuckle as she shivers through the whole length of the chapel! We make the talkative girl keep quiet, and the rosy girl who wins an appetite on the hockey ground fast when there ' s fried chicken and chocolate cream for dinner. We love to see the boastful girl tremble in her boots — no, in her bare feet — when we lead her into a dark room where Scrooge ' s ghost walks, dragging chains ; where Poe ' s black cat is holding carnival and all the myths and mysteries are taking shape and sound. The only thing that mars the fun just here is that to reach the finest results we have to send her in alone and we cannot hear her heart beat and see her eyes grow big. We have found though that fun is elusive; some of it nearly always escapes. But the funniest fun, the climax of fun, is the time-honored, historic midnight feast. These furnish the height of — I know I am violating rule seventy by using the same word so often that both Mr. Genung and the head of the English Department will disown me — but it would never do to leave any part of the fun out. Besides, if I use a substitute the students might forget my subject, which by way of emphasis let me remind you is the use of the word fun. Because the midnight feast is the highest limit of fun, the attic is the proper place for its celebration. A midnight feast is fun all through. From the time we begin to try to capture the key to the elevator room till we have forgotten that feast in planning for another one. We decide at first we will get the master key, but in a big basket of keys all new and bright, who can tell a master key? Besides, it would be more apt to be missed. We must get the real key to the elevator door; so we send one after another to look through the keys for one marked elevator, and fail to find it. But we do find a girl who has borrowed the master key to do reference work. All the doors have been locked for the night. While she is busy we run and unlock the door to our feasting hall and slip the key back. She finishes her work and restores the key, innocent that other hands have touched it. After supper we settle down to our books. How funny it is to let our minds wander away from Wordsworth, the Primrose, the Daisy, the Sonnet, and revel in the attic! Will it be dark and cold? What, that Aladdin ' s palace! How funny to leave our surds to rationalize themselves while we begin to be absurd by filling our clothes-bags — not with cuffs, handkerchiefs and turnovers — but cans of beans, bottles of pickle, olives, sauce, catsup, boxes of crackers and potted— everything! How funny it is to not undress