"We're here to correct these mistakes," he said. "You were all singing on the public street at one o'clock in the morning, weren't you?"
"We were trying to," said Emmons, still friendly.
"Ten days apiece," said the magistrate. "Call the next case."
If any one had removed the floor from under these Seniors and let them drop one thousand and one feet into space they couldn't have felt more shocked. Even the clerk and the desk sergeant were amazed. They tried to help explain, but the human vinegar-cruet turned around and spat the following through his clenched teeth:
"Gentlemen, I have been appointed to sit on this bench and I don't need any help. Any more objections will be in contempt of court. Sergeant, remove these young thugs and have them sent to the workhouse at once."
Maybe you don't think the college seethed when the news got out. There were the leading lights of the school, including the president of the Senior class, the chairman of the Junior promenade, two halfbacks, the pitcher on the baseball team and the president of the Y. M. C. A., all on the works for ten days, along with as choice an assortment of plain drunks and fancy resters as you could find in ninety miles of mainline railroad. The students fairly went mad and bit at the air. Even the Faculty got busy and Prexy dropped over to the police court to square it. He came out a minute later very white around the mouth. I don't know what Old Maledictions said to him, but it was a great sufficiency, I guess. He seemed as insulted as Lord Tennyson might have been if the milkman had pulled his whiskers.
There wasn't a thing to be done. The Faculty appealed to the mayor, but old Scroggs had some regular Spanish-bit hold on him in the way of a short-time note, I guess, and he washed his hands of the whole affair. Our college great men were hauled out to the works and served their time. When they got out they were sights. They weren't strong on sanitation in workhouses in those days. Even their friends shook hands with them with tongs. Think of sixteen proud monarchs of the campus making brick in striped suits, with a cross foreman who used to haul ashes from the college campus lording it over them and tracing their ancestry back through thirty generations of undesirable citizens! Nice, wasn't it? Oh, very!