Our second day was spent in the ordeal of examination, in the selection and arrangement of our room, and engaging board at the most eligible place. Our room, at the suggestion of Mr. Carrover, was chosen in the South Building, and after innumerable expenditures, and Ned’s taste for arrangement, it really looked comfortable and home like. We passed the different departments of study without any serious difficulty, and the bell for evening prayers found us ready for the session’s work.

We took a little stroll after tea, and were fortunate in meeting no one. Returning to our room and lighting up, we got our books and commenced to prepare, with all the interest of novelty, our lessons for the morrow. We had not been thus engaged more than half an hour when there arose in a distant part of the campus the most diabolical din conceivable: a fiendish combination of all the disagreeable noises produceable. Tin horns, tin pan drums, bells, whistles, paper trumpets, and the vox humana in its loudest, harshest notes, all roared forth their terrible discord on the still night air.

We leaned out of our window and listened to this caravan of horrid sounds approaching, till it entered the South Building. Even then we did not suspect its destination, and not till we heard the procession tramping noisily up the stairs leading to our room did the truth flash upon us that we were the intended victims. It was too late to fasten the door. In a moment the room was full of our tormentors, each one trying to drown the other’s clamor by extra exertion on his own part. They formed a circle around us and beat, and blew, and shouted till we were deafened and stupefied with the noise.

Suddenly it ceased—everything was ominously still, and with sober face every one commenced active preparation for the more serious business of the evening. The door was closed and locked, the bed was stripped and the sheets hung up at the windows, with their edges stuffed in the cracks. Each then drew forth from his pocket an enormous pipe, and putting tobacco in it, began to smoke. Not the ordinary puffs of a pleasure whiff, but lighting about half a pipe full they would put more tobacco in on the fire, and instead of drawing, blow with all their might, ejecting from the bowl of the pipe a stream as large, and almost as solid as a man’s wrist. As soon as I divined their object I got up and lay down across the bed, taking the pillow in my hand, that I might lay my face in it if it became very bad.

The great volumes of smoke, rolling up to the ceiling, now began to spread into a thickening vapor that filled the room, growing denser and denser every second, and I found myself constantly coughing. Another minute and the moving forms of the smokers could scarcely be seen, while the lamp standing on the mantel was only a dim halo in the white fog. The smokers now had to relieve each other, placing a guard at the door to prevent our exit. Thicker and thicker grew the cloud, till the lungs, wearied with incessant coughing, almost refused to inhale the bitter, sickening air. My eyes streaming with water closed themselves in spite of me, and my eyeballs were crossed with the nausea. I pressed my face down into the pillow for relief, but even that seemed a bag of tobacco, that was driving its dust into my throat. Every particle of air had its concomitant particle of smoke, and with every wretched gasp I gulped down a wad of poison.

A ton of weight seemed pressing on my chest, and my eyeballs almost started from my head in my intense efforts to feed my famished lungs, and to prevent the suffocation I was enduring. A few more gasps and a death-like sickness seized me; the smoke closed around my head like the band of the Inquisition, and pressed all consciousness and sensation out. With a blinding rush of darkness over my brain I fainted.

The first thing I knew as a fact of consciousness was a vague perception of the odor of camphor and brandy; then I knew that my hands were being violently chafed, and that something cold and wet lay on my forehead. My temples ached with a dull, unrelievable pain, and a deadly nausea seemed to pervade the very atmosphere. I opened my eyes and found that I was in a strange room, on a strange bed, around which were grouped half a dozen forms with anxious, fear-whitened faces. Some were holding bottles, some basins of water, and all intently watching my face for signs of returning consciousness. I swallowed a little of the brandy they held to my lips, and as it burnt its way through my system I found strength to speak. Sitting upon the side of the bed, with the support of two of those attending, I asked, in an idiotic way:

“What—are—you all doing here? Where—am—I?”

Their courage and effrontery revived as I revived, and their propensity for devilling returned as I returned to consciousness. There was a pause after I had spoken, and then a deep voice answered, in solemn tones:

“You are in hell! As soon as you can walk we will go down to the sulphur lake. Pyrophylax, see that the chains are candescent and send in a bowl of melted lead; he looks thirsty.”

The utter confusion of ideas consequent upon my loss of consciousness, and the miserable feelings I was enduring, rendered this assertion not at all improbable to me, and I would not have been very much surprised to have seen the brazen gate flung open, and the aimless chasers of the giddy flag the great Guelph saw in his Inferno, racing around the arid sand. At this point, however, some one said that I had had enough for one time, and offered to show me the way back to my room. Supported by his arm I staggered along the hall to my own room, which had been deserted and opened, to allow the smoke to clear out. The door was open, the windows raised, and the breeze, like a kind housewife, had swept the smoke away, but its disgusting smell still clung to the curtains and the walls.

Poor Ned was lying on the bed in a profound sleep. His corpse-like paleness, however, showed how much he had suffered, and the bucket near the bed side bore testimony to his sickness. It would have been cruel to have aroused him, so I lay gently down beside him and slept till morning.

A sick headache next day, and an intense smell of tobacco clinging to everything tangible, alone told us of the night’s scene, and it slipped back, with the ever passing pains and pleasures of life, into memory’s great reservoir.