PRIZE ESSAY No. 5.
SOCIAL LIFE AT YALE.
THE gray dawn of a winter morning is stealing over the Yale Campus. The great piles of buildings that comprise the college dormitories loom up in the indistinct light like monsters of olden time. The giant elms wave their branches as if seeking to beckon back the summer that is past and gone. The ground is white with the first snow of the season, and paths are being shovelled in every direction over the Campus by the janitors and their assistants. Suddenly from the doorway of one of the dormitories a young man emerges. He is heavily booted, and is clad in a fashionable cape coat and English hunting-cap, with huge fur gloves. He pauses a moment, and then walks rapidly away across the Campus. He is followed soon after by another student, then a third, and in an incredibly short space of time several hundred young men, some of whom are completing their half-finished toilets, are hurrying through the snow in a dozen different directions.
The boys are going to their eating-clubs to get breakfast. As there is no "Memorial Hall" or college dining-room at Yale, the "club system" is maintained by most of the students, rather from necessity than from choice. In each club are some ten or a dozen boon companions, who dwell together in more or less peace and harmony. They are almost literally members of one family. They eat together thrice every day. They very often room in the same entry in college. They spend much of the time in one another's rooms during the day, and frequent the same places of amusement. Few men form closer friendships than those which exist between the members of the average eating-club.
The student, upon reaching his "joint," as the club is called, hurriedly bolts a few mouthfuls of breakfast and swallows a cup of coffee, in the mean time talking over with his table-companions the latest scandal, the prospects of the nine or crew, or the current society gossip. Thus the moments speed by; and finally, with half-appeased appetite (for the Yale man never spends over ten minutes at breakfast), he starts for chapel. In this praiseworthy undertaking he is joined by several hundred other men, some of whom are running in order to reach chapel before the beginning of the services, a failure to accomplish this purpose being attended by "two marks," which the ever-watchful "monitor" inscribes against the name of the delinquent.
