Page:1880. A Tramp Abroad.djvu/59

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CORPS-ETIQUETTE.
47

aisle and disappeared. An instant rush for some other lecture room followed, and in a minute I was alone with the empty benches once more.

Yes, without doubt, idle students are not the rule. Out of eight hundred in the town, I knew the faces of only about fifty; but these I saw everywhere, and daily.

IDLE STUDENT.

They walked about the streets and the wooded hills, they drove in cabs, they boated on the river, they sipped beer and coffee, afternoons, in the Schloss gardens. A good many of them wore the colored caps of the corps. They were finely and fashionably dressed, their manners were quite superb, and they led an easy, careless, comfortable life. If a dozen of them sat together, and a lady or a gentleman passed whom one of them knew and saluted, they all rose to their feet and took off their caps.

The members of a corps always received a fellow-member in this way, too; but they paid no attention to members of other corps; they did not seem to see them. This was not a discourtesy; it was only a part of the elaborate and rigid corps-etiquette.

There seems to be no chilly distance existing between the German students and the professor; but on the contrary, a companionable intercourse, the opposite of chilliness and reserve. When the professor enters a beer hall in the evening where students are gathered together, these rise up and take off their caps, and invite the old gentleman to sit with them and partake. He accepts, and the pleasant talk and