CHAPTER I.
TROUBLE BREWING.
"Here's to good old Yale--drink it down! Here's to good old Yale--drink it down! Here's to good old Yale, She's so hearty and so hale-- Drink it down! Drink it down! down! down!" From the open window of his rooms on York Street Frank Merriwell heard the distant chorus of a rollicking band of students who had been having a merry evening in town.
Frank had passed his examinations successfully and had been admitted as a student at Yale.

In order to accomplish this without taking a preparatory course at Phillips Academy, he had found it necessary to vigorously "brush up" the knowledge he had acquired at the Fardale Military Academy which was a college preparatory school.
Professor Scotch, Frank's guardian, had been of great assistance to him, for the professor knew just about what would be required at the entrance examination, and he had kept the boy digging away away at the propositions in the First Book of Euclid, had drilled him in Caesar, caused him to spend weary hours over Virgil and the Iliad, and made him not a little weary of his Xenophon.
As he passed without a condition, although he had been told again and again that a course at Phillips Academy was almost an absolute necessity, Frank was decidedly grateful to the professor.
Professor Scotch's anxiety had brought him to New Haven, where he remained "till the agony was over," as Frank expressed it.

The little man bubbled over with delight when he found his _protege_ had gone through without a struggle.
Having secured the rooms on York Street, the professor saw Frank comfortably settled, and then, before taking his departure, he attempted to give the boy some wholesome advice.
"Don't try to put on many frills here the first year," he said.

"You will find that freshmen do not cut much of a figure here.

It doesn't make any difference what you have done or what you have been elsewhere, you will have to establish a record by what you do and what you become here.