Old Miami the Yale of the Early West
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is a tradition, dating back to the time of people who should have known, that the Indian word 'Miami" meant mother. Nowadays people usually forget that the name is aboriginal at all; and cultured Easterners give it a rich, garlicky Italian twang, as they drawl it at you in melodious tones, "Mee- aw-mee." However, the old tradition lingers in its savage beauty and takes a real significance in the eyes of those much-abused but naively self-sufficient college organizations, the Greek-letter fraternities. For out of the loins of little old Miami, in the years "befo' de wah," arose in turn three of the largest, mostprosperous, and most widely-extended of these secret brotherhoods. Far be it from this sketch to attempt discussion of the impulses or ideals which operate to produce these unions of choice spirits,
...these gatherings of the elect, or whatever else they choose to call themselves. The closed circle of intimates is as old as time; and contemporary with it arose a tendency to inward "peeve" and consuming jealousy among those just outside the circle. If twenty picked men are gathered from a possible hundred, the pathetic part is not played by the hundredth man, but by Number 21. When Og and Glug, among the pre-Adamite cave- dwellers, happened upon a valley where sweet red berries grew, invited Wap to share their secret, and gathered daily in their close retreat to munch and snooze and barter confidences; when they decked themselves with the shiny fruit, leered inthe faces of Tub and Blub?who weren't asked?and called themselves a string of gutturals meaning in their lingo "Order of the Sacred Grotto where the Red Berry Grows:" there appeared, in germ, the Greek letter fraternity minus the Greek. In the college community there is particular need for these limited brotherhoods....
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