The Diary of a Freshman

Charles Flandrau

Charles Macomb Flandrau

The Diary of a Freshman

I

Mamma left for home this afternoon. As I want to be perfectly truthful in my diary, I suppose I must confess that before she actually went away I sometimes thought I should be rather relieved when she was no longer here. Mamma has a fixed idea that I came to college for the express purpose of getting my feet wet by day, and sleeping in a draught by night. She began the furnishing of my rooms by investing in a pair of rubber boots, – the kind you tie around your waist with a string. The clerk in the shop asked her if I was fond of trout-fishing, and she explained to him that I had always lived in the West where the climate was dry, and that she did n't know how I would stand the dampness of the seacoast. Mamma thought the clerk was so interested in my last attack of tonsillitis I didn't have the heart to tell her that all the time he was looking sympathetic with his right eye, he was winking at me with his left.

Now that she is gone, however, I don't see how I could have thought, even for a moment, that I should be glad, and I 've been sitting here for an hour just looking at my room and all the nice things she advised me about and helped me to choose – wishing she could see how cosey it is late at night with the green lamp lighted and a little fire going. (It is n't really cool enough for a fire; I had to take my coat off for a while, the room got so warm – but I was anxious to know how the andirons looked with a blaze behind them.) I suppose she is lying awake in the sleeping-car thinking of me. She made me move my bed to the other side of the room, so that it would n't be near the window. I moved it back again; but I think now I 'll change it again to the way she liked it.

Of course I was disappointed last May when I found I hadn't drawn a room in one of the college buildings. I had an idea that if you did n't live in one of the buildings owned by the college you would n't feel, somehow, as if you "belonged." Before I arrived in Cambridge I worried a good deal over it. The old Harvard men at home were most unsatisfactory about this when I asked their advice. The ones who had lived in the Yard when they were in college seemed to think there was n't any particular use in going to college at all unless you could live either in their old rooms or some in the same building; and the ones who had lived outside as I am going to do (this year, anyhow) said the college buildings were nice enough in their way, but if I could only get the dear old place (which was pulled down fifteen years ago) where James Russell Lowell had scratched his name on the window-pane, and where somebody else (I 've forgotten who it was) crawled up the big chimney when the sheriff came to arrest him for debt and was discovered because he did not crawl far enough, I should be all right.

I don't see how the good times and the advantages of a place like this hold out for so long; everybody who has been here speaks as if he had about used them up.

Well, we found rooms pleading to be rented; every other house in Cambridge has a "Student's Room to Let" card in the window. Even some of the rooms in the Yard had been given up at the last minute by fellows who flunked their exams. Mamma said she felt very sorry for the poor boys; and after that the enormity of my having been conditioned in physics and solid geometry decreased considerably. The trouble (there were four days full of it) wasn't in finding a good place, but in trying to decide on some one place. For a while it looked as though I should either have to live in five separate houses – some of them over a mile apart – or give up going to college. We dragged up and down all the quiet side streets within a reasonable distance of the Yard, ringing bells and asking questions until the words "I should like to look at" and "What is the price of?" began to sound like some kind of a silly English Meisterschaft system. Several times when we were very tired we wandered by mistake into houses we had been t