University of Maryland College Park - Terrapin / Reveille Yearbook (College Park, MD)

Page 31 text:

THK CLASS OF 97

Page 33 text:

as§ is+crvj cind R roplicev ?T ' WAS not so very long ago ; only four years ; and yet it seems much longer to us ; since we began our course at the college, a lot of green and unsophisticated Freshmen, unacquainted with bedslats as weapons of offense, and unac- quainted with the customs and habits of that crowd of dignified individuals whom we soon learned were the Sophomores. Experience is the best, if also the most severe, of all teachers, and e ' er long we began to look upon that gang of brutes, (as we then considered them) as being hardly fit to be classed among civilized beings. We thought that it had come to an issue and that the biological law relating to the Sur- vival of the Fittest would surely be most appli- cable to our class. It was painful in the extreme to be obliged to rise from our comfortable cots in the dead of night, and address a crowd of persons who were masked beyond recognition, meanwhile suffering all the torture that a strong arm, with a bedslat at the end of it, could inflict. Some of our members had, it is true, suffered all this the previous year, in the Preparatory Department ; but that feeling of class fellowship, which has always been a noticable char- acteristic of our class, made it hard for them to see their fellows mistreated. All things com e round to him who will but wait is an old adage, and when the September of another year rolled around, we found ourselves as dignifled and as overbearing as our predecessors had been, and woe to the vile and verdant Fresh- man who dared to cross our path. New faces appeared among us that year, Gardiner, Lewis, Heward, Posey, Queen, Welty and Dorsey were added to our list. 27