Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 November 1884 — Freshmen and Sophomores. [ARTICLE]

Freshmen and Sophomores.

A party of Sophomores in a wellknown college last year visited, at night a dormitory where three Freshmen slept, and, dragging them out of bed, took them to the highroad and informed them that they must sing and dance, one by one, until bidden to stop. The ground was covered with snow, and their victims wore only their nightshirts. The first lad who was brought forward fought like a tiger, and provoked his tormentors to make his punishment longer than they had intended. The second cried like a girl, and begged for mercy. His torture was prolonged even more than the other. The’third, a slight, erect boy, surrounded by a dozen barley young fellows, looked at them with a smile of contemptuous amusement. “I should think,” he said, quietly, “you were too old for such childish sport. I will neither sing nor dance. You can, of course, do what you please to me, being twenty to one. But I warn you that if you lay a finger on me, you shall be arrested and punished to-morrow like any other bullies who break the law.” “I felt,” said one of the students afterward, “like a very small boy standing before a man.” The same feeling, and perhaps the unexpected appeal to cold law, sQbered and daunted the Sophomores. At any rate, the Freshman was permitted to return unharmed to his dormitory. Very few men are called upon to bear any severer test than the Freshman year usually proves to a boy. It is ordinarily his first release from the restraints of home. He feels his new manhood, and is vain of it, while his fellow-students, in numberless torturing and cruel ways, seek to “take the vanity out of him.” Whether he bears the ordeal like a weak boy, or a manly man, depends very much on his home training. If he has been taught to fear public opinion, and to attach supreme importance to trifles, he will be miserable. If, on the other hand, he has been given a character lofty enough to look down on passing annoyances, he will soon gain the respect even of his tormentors.— Youth’s Companion.

An American mioroscopist, who has been investigating the causes of certain frantic movements of the common house fly under the stimulant of strong light, has discovered that the fly is often the victim of a disease of the brain arising from the presence of myriads of minute insects. These parasites, though perfect inseots, are so small that 10,000 can be packed in a fly’s cranium. The, disease sometimes becomes epidemic, and millions of flies perish of it in a season.