THE FRESHMAN'S DREAM.
had been in College about two months, and was, like ev
ery other engineering Freshman, crammed full of math
ematics. Indeed so much of this subject had been my task
to master, that on this particular evening, my brain was
one vast chaos of positive and negative numbers, of peculiar
exponents and co-efficients, of radical signs and imaginary
quantities, of function of Xin infinite series, and of planes,
angles, tangents, pyramids, cones, and spheres.
It was after an evening of hard study, that I retired about
midnight to rest from my ceaseless toil. 0, toil and work
0, wearisome task ! How difficult is the problem of college
life to solve, how infinitely far away its end and its honor.
But the demands of exhausted nature soon broke the thread
of such thoughts, and caused me to fall asleep.
But even sleep could offer no comfort, for scarcely had I
lost consciousness, when the wall at my left hand opened,
and a huge parallelopiped, emerging from the black depths
beyond, placed itself upon my chest. This was very un
comfortable, and I tried to remove it, but it would not
budge; I tried to roll over, but it held me fast, and all the
while it was getting heavier and heavier. I was just plan
ning some other method of escape, when a thrust in the
ribs made me turn my head, only to find that I was sur
rounded by assailants on all sides. A sharp pointed triangle
kept poking at my ribs, a cylinder nearly strangled me by
lying across my throat, a derived function was in each ear
trying to expand, two were cutting figures in my skin, a
truncated prism held down each hand, while an raised to
the tenth power danced a Highland Fling, first on one hand
and then on the other. Equations smothered me like 4
swarm of flies around a dish of honey, while various and
innumerable geometrical figures played all sorts of games
over and around me,—sliding, rolling, and jumping on me
Thumb-=Nall Sketches.