Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 November 1881 — The Scared Professor. [ARTICLE]

The Scared Professor.

There is no use of disguising the fact that the boys who attend our colleges are pretty tough cases on general principles. Not that they would commit crimes, or do things that are particularly dishonorable, but they are as full of tho old Nick as they can hold. You take the best boy you can find in the public schools, one who has had a religious training, and seems to have a pious turn of mind, and who is so good that all the other boys think he is booked for heaven, and send him off to college, and you want to watch him. The chances are that he will come back with a knowledge of draw poker that will paralyze an old gambler, and he will be sure to be a leader in all the deviltry that is going on. An illustration of this was furnished a short time ago in one of .our state colleges devoted to turning out. pious young men. The class in elocution was furnished with a professor from a distant city, who was very thorough in his methods, but he didn’t amount to anything at handling boys. He seemed to look at them in the class room appealingly, as much as to beg them not to play any monkey work on* him. The boys saw he was afraid of them, and they laid for him. They got into a discussion over the proper way to render a passage from the poem, “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” when one of the students called the other a liar. The professor held up his hands in horror, and begged them to be seated, when th.e young man who had been called a liar drew a revolver and shot at the other student, who fell to the floor an alleged corpse. The professor was wild, and at this point the lights went out and every student drew a revolver and began firing blank cartridges in the air. Some were armed with putty balls and eggs, and at each discharge something would strike the professor, and he thought he w.. 8 full of holes. A window was raised-, and by the light made by the exploding cartridges a pair of coat tails and legs could be seen going out, and the professor landed head first on some lilac bushes. They rushed to the window and the poor man, bruised and bleeding, and as scared as it was possible for a man to be, was running for dear life. The next morning he took the train for home, with a black eye, and clothes that looked as though something had been scraped off of them, and the faculty of the college will not know what has become of their profession of elocution till they read this. The boys go about their studies as though nothing had happened, but they are trying to think up some new deviltry. Boys will be boys, and there is no way you can prevent it, unless you break their backs. —[\<ks Sun.