“Well, how do you like it as far as you’ve got?” asked the senior, glancing around the room to see what kind of things Lindsay had brought with him, and then making a general summing-up on the new boy himself.
“Pretty well,” replied Lindsay. “I don’t feel quite at home yet.”
“You’ll be homesick for about a week, dead homesick. After that you’ll begin to get used to things, like a prisoner to the jail. In two or three months you’ll think you’ve always lived here, and by the time you’ve been here a couple of years you’ll be so fond of the place that you’ll hate to leave it to go to college. Where do you live when you’re at home?”
“Why, you’re right in your own dooryard! You’ve no call to be homesick. It might be different if you lived in a cañon twenty-five hundred miles away, as I do.”
“I didn’t say I was homesick,” protested Lindsay.
“That’s a fact, you didn’t! I wonder how I got the idea we were talking about homesickness.”
Wolcott looked sharply at Tompkins, suspicious, as every new boy in strange surroundings, that he was being played upon. But Tompkins merely blinked in return with his blank four-cornered eyes, and Wolcott’s suspicions vanished.
“I should think it would grow monotonous after a while,” he said, “just studying and reciting and going to chapel and the gymnasium.”
Tompkins grinned. “Beastly monotonous; but that programme doesn’t exist outside the school catalogue. The fact is there’s so everlasting much going on that it seems wicked to waste time on such ordinary things as studying and going to recitations. That’s what Smith and Wilder thought.”
And as Lindsay naturally wished to know about Smith and Wilder, Tompkins consented to explain.
“They had this room earlier in the year. Smith came all the way from Omaha for the benefits of the institution. He cut four recitations in two weeks and the third week he was on his way back to the West. Then Wilder turned up and took the room. He wasn’t a strong boy, his mother said, and she got him excused from gymnasium on a doctor’s certificate. I never heard whether all the cigarettes he smoked were on the doctor’s certificate, too, but he proved too sickly to stand the strain, and after a couple of months was sent home to his mamma. You’re the third.”