THE BATTALION.
17
Observations.
We are here a crowd of boys a year or two, a month or a
week and we were entire strangers, coming from different,
parts of the country. If we have observed, say nothing of
what has been told us, we ought to know something of each
other by this time. Boys how well do you know your fellow
cadets? I venture that there are some who have been here
a year or more and have hardly spoken to others than per
haps a half dozen early made friends; other “fresh fish”
as they are called, have hardly been here a day until they
know everything, disgusting or irritating us by trying to ad
dress us in the most familiar terms when probably it is tne
first time that we have met them. There are timid, close
observing boys hardly known outside of the circle of their du
ties that probably have more insight into the character of their
fellow-students than those of apparently more general ac
quaintance. Of course the larger class take a matter of fact
course and in the course of time becomes more or less ac
quainted with the entire corps.
The voluntary seclusive set are generally of limited knowl
edge, know little of books and men, in short the ways of the
world and care less. Can they be said to be drifting? No
they are not drifting, they content themselves to crawl in
some old abandoned shell and there with no neighbors save
the parasitic inmates or a few scattered ones of the same
species, pass their time away in ignorance and blissful inno
cence and when they die. the world is none the wiser or
better by their having lived.
As for the big “blab mouthed know-all” his days at college
are generally few. He is purely a surface creature, his
knowledge is purely superficial, he is like the foam of the
waves, light and airy, it rides upon the crest seething,
blustering, bubbling, menacing, everything but really incapa
ble of doing harm, it is cast into crannies, holes or crevices
or absorbed by the sands simply for want of weight.
The modest boy may and more often does possess true