Don't attempt, in a large dining hall, to get a place at a society, club, or athletic table for which you have not yet qualified. You are liable to queer yourself from the start.

Don't try continually to air the sum of knowledge which you are just assimilating. There are few things more pathetic than the first-year chemist who keeps asking you at table to "pass the NaCl," or the fledgling psychologist who would try to prove that bread-and-butter is matter for the mind and not for the stomach.

Don't keep telling how they do things in that part of the country which you come from. The assumption is, that since you came to College, you are willing to learn something of how they do things here.

Don't monopolize the conversation at the table, especially if there are older men around. You'll get yourself snubbed if you talk too much about yourself. Fellows don't care much whether your grandfather kept a brake and ten horses, or drove a "shay" over the plank-road. Be a good listener. Then, too, older men like to be listened to. The chances are you will learn a sight more by hearing them than they will by hearing you.

Don't continually find fault with the things you have to eat. Act as if you were used to eating away from home. Half the time the jokes you make at the expense of the food come merely from an uncontrollable desire to air your wit. "Knocking the grub" doesn't require half so much brains or individuality as shutting up about it.