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.