walk in the footsteps of the only perfect One ever seen on earth.

By trimming the midnight lamp and ruining my eyes, I won a scholarship
which paid my tuition fees and room rent, so that I was released from
the necessity of drawing on the hard-earned savings of my father. The
usual college pranks were played, tubs of water were poured from
upper windows upon the heads of freshmen who insisted upon wearing
stove-pipe hats and the forbidden canes; we tore each others' clothes
to the verge of nakedness, and broke each others' heads in frantic
football rushes; we indulged in ghost-like sheet and pillow-case
parades, during which we fought the police and made night hideous with
yells and scrimmages with the "townies"; we burned unsightly shanties,
and thus improved the appearance of the city.

We tripped up unpopular professors with ropes in the night, on the
icy, steep sidewalk of college street, sending them bumping down the
long hill, hatless and with badly torn pants till they brought up with
dull thuds against the barber shop on South Main Street; we of course
stole the college bell so there was nothing to call us to prayers or
recitations; we howled for hours under their respective windows:

"Here's to old Harkness, for he is an imp of darkness!
Here's to old Cax., for his nose is made of wax!
Here's to old Prex--for he likes his double x!"

until some of us were thrust by the police into the nauseating dens of
the stationhouse.

Thus, like pendulums, we swung twixt studies and pranks till the boom
of the rebel cannon bombarding Fort Sumpter thundered upon our ears.