hosiery adorned his feet, while the inevitable Cheshire cat grin beautified
his cherubic countenance. A latest "best seller" was propped on his knees,
and as he perused its thrilling pages, he carelessly strummed his beloved
banjo, and in stentorian tones chanted a sentimental ballad:

"Gone are the days--the golden days I'm dreaming of,
I think I hear her softly calling (plunkety-plunk)
'Will you be back? Will you be back? (plunk-plunk)
Back to the Car-o-li-nah you love?'"(plunkety-plunk),

For three golden campus years T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had gayly pursued the
even tenor (or basso, since he possessed a foghorn, subterranean voice)
of his Bannister career. He absolutely refused to take life seriously, and
he was forever arousing the wrath--mostly pretended, for no one could be
really angry with the genial youth--of his comrades, by twanging his banjo
and roaring out rollicking ballads at all hours. He was never so happy
as when entertaining a crowd of happy students in his cozy quarters,
or escorting a Hicks' Personally Conducted expedition downtown for a
Beef-Steak Bust, at his expense, at Jerry's, the rendezvous of hungry
collegians.

However, despite his butterfly existence, Hicks, possessed of a
scintillating mind, always set the scholastic pace for 1919, by means of
occasional study-sprints, as he characteristically called them. But when it
came to helping his beloved Dad realize a long-cherished ambition to behold
his only son and heir shatter Hicks, Sr.'s, celebrated athletic records, it
was a different story. T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., ever since he committed
the farcical faux pas of running the wrong way with the pigskin in
the Freshman-Sophomore football contest of his first year, had been a
super-colossal athletic joke at old Bannister.