The Girl and the Game and Other College Stories/Talks with a Kid Brother/An Unofficial Baccalaureate

You may imagine that I have dropped in here this morning to remind you, with an indulgent smile, of how little you really know about this wide, wide world you are entering with such "high hopes and noble aspirations"; how many disillusionments you are bound to suffer; what hard bumps you are going to receive upon a somewhat enlarged head; what a truly pitiful and possibly absurd spectacle you young graduates present, vainly trying to set a rather solid world on fire by means of little sheep-skin diplomas tied with pretty ribbons. In short, that you are now saying good-by to the happiest period of existence—if you only knew it; that life from this time forth to the end is a series of struggles mingled with disappointments and sorrows; that you probably won't get what you want or if you get it you won't want it, and that most of the ​zest and poetry and fun of living have gone never to return. But I don't intend to say anything of the sort.
If I patronize you on your ignorance of the world—and I suppose I shall—it will be on the score of your ignorance of what a very good place, on the whole, it is, this "great school of life," as your orators call it who have heard about it. And if

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