forty-five seconds after nine, and all ’s well in the halls of Nu Delta,” and so on for an hour. Then he was relieved by another freshman, who took up the chant.
Nightly the freshmen had to entertain the upper¬ classmen, and if the entertainment was n’t satis¬ factory, as it never was, the entertainers were paddied. They had to run races, shoving pennies across the floor with their noses. The winner was paddled for going too fast—“Did n’t he have any sense of sportsmanship?”—and the loser was paddied for going too slow. Most of the freshmen lost skin off their noses and foreheads; all of them shivered at the sight of a paddle. By the end of the first week they were whispering to each other! how many blisters they had on their buttocks.
It was a bitterly cold night in late February when the Nu Deltas took the freshmen for their “walk.” They drove in automobiles fifteen miles into the country and then left the freshmen to walk back. It was four o’clock in the morning when the miser¬ able freshmen reached the campus, half frozen, unutterably weary, but thankful that the end of the! initiation was at hand.
Hugh was thankful for another thing; the Nt Deltas did not brand. He had noticed several mer in the swimming-pool with tiny Greek letters branded on their chests or thighs. The brandec ones seemed proud of their permanent insignia, bui
