The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Freshman
I WAS sitting in the office at the close of a tiresome registration week when he came in shyly and apologetically. He was a freshman, two thousand miles from home, he said, and he was sick—too sick to study, too sick to eat.
I inquired as to his symptoms, but they were indefinite, elusive. He was suffering, but his pain was not "localized" as the physicians say. As I suggested remedies, other troubles presented themselves, until finally he broached the subject of going home, and I knew he was homesick. I fixed him up—no matter how. The main point of the story is that he stuck; he fought it out as every manly boy does. He is an instructor now teaching other freshmen, and very likely has forgotten the whole circumstance.
If in all the disorder and confusion of the new duties and the new scenes incident to the opening of college some lonesome freshman has felt the call of home, there is nothing in that to be ashamed of. Perhaps those who have not had these feelings are less to be commended than those who have. It is rather a credit than otherwise to be in love with home.
Before long, if you keep at it, the interest in your daily work will develop, the thing which seemed so chaotic and confused will resolve itself into the orderly and the familiar; friends will spring up, pleasant associations will be formed—associations almost as pleasant, perhaps, as those you had at home, and the pain and the longing will grow less. As I recall them now, the boys who have grown homesick have usually been those who have cared most for the ideals and the principles of home; they have been good boys who, if they stayed, have developed into strong men.
Some day not far distant as you catch a glimpse of a newly formed friend across the green quadrangle stretching in front of University Hall, or as you see "Bart" kick a difficult goal on Illinois Field or Pogue carry the ball across the line for a touchdown, a wave of feeling will rush over you, and you will realize that you are a part of it all, and that it is your college and your campus, and your team, and that it is home here, and you love it.
And the homesick feeling will be gone.
September