The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Loafer
I heard him complain:
"You have waked me too soon,
I must slumber again."
I HAVE never known what loafer it was who inspired these ancient lines, but I have always suspected that the fellow who wrote them had met Higgins. Higgins was a direct descendant of one, of the seven sleepers; he was on the most intimate terms with Morpheus, and Somnus, and ether and all the other gods and agencies which induce prolonged and refreshing sleep.
I have called him over the telephone at noon to be told by the freshman who answered that he was not up yet. I have dropped in at his fraternity house at nine in the evening to be informed that he was rather tired and had gone to bed early. I have found him dozing before the fire at three o'clock in the afternoon, a cigarette between his lips. A loafer always smokes, though of course a great many people who smoke are not loafers. I have often wondered what became of him; he didn't graduate, and he's probably dead, or asleep at the switch.
We read a great deal about the dissipations of college life—of the real devils who drink and gamble and indulge in unnamable immoralities, but most of it is "bunk". The real menace of college life today is the loafer—the fellow who smokes himself into stupidity before the grate fire, who wastes his hours in billiard halls and ice cream parlors, at vaudeville and moving picture shows, and in strolling about the town and the campus imagining himself in love. It is the man who sits up late at night doing nothing worth while, and who sleeps late in the morning to get over it, who does the college and himself more damage than any other class of students.
The loafer can't or won't work himself, and he is seldom satisfied to loaf alone. He is a procrastinator without enthusiasm or plan or system in his work. It has never occurred to him that college is a real business to which he should give his serious attention. He could not study regularly three hours a day on a bet. He encourages cribbing because it is his main dependence at an examination, he puts a damper on intellectual progress, and he pulls down the scholastic average. There is no place for him in college or out of it. His only salvation is to get a job where he will have to work hard sixteen hours a day.
July