Page:The Sunday Eight O'Clock (1916).pdf/186

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have found him dozing before the fire at three o'clock in the afternoon, a cigarette between his lips. A loafer always smokes, though of course a great many people who smoke are not loafers. I have often wondered what became of him; he didn't graduate, and he's probably dead, or asleep at the switch.

We read a great deal about the dissipations of college life—of the real devils who drink and gamble and indulge in unnamable immoralities, but most of it is "bunk". The real menace of college life today is the loafer—the fellow who smokes himself into stupidity before the grate fire, who wastes his hours in billiard halls and ice cream parlors, at vaudeville and moving picture shows, and in strolling about the town and the campus imagining himself in love. It is the man who sits up late at night doing nothing worth while, and who sleeps late in the morning to get over it, who does the