Add another one to the Southerners-who-went-north-to-Ivy-League-schools-and-didn't-love-it tally: William Alexander Percy. From Lanterns on the Levee, "At the Harvard Law School":
...My next lesson in differences was more amusing. Harley Stowell and I had been invited to dine with a middle-aged professor and his wife at their home. Except for the usual bolt-upright atmosphere it was a tasteful house and everything except me ran smoothly and decorously.
An immense bird-cage full of canaries filled the end of the dining room to my right behind our host. On each plate sat a snowy napkin innocently folded and refolded into a sort of battleship. I must have been feeling unpardonably vivacious, for in undoing my napkin I gave it an airy little brown roll shaped like a torpedo which described a slow parabola and lit with a wiry band on top of the bird-cage. No one could pretend it hadn't happened. A bandersnatch or a whooping crane flying across the room could not have had higher visibility. The impact with the bird-cage sounded like a Stravinsky chord on an untuned harp, and all the canaries burst into a paean of dismay or applause. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to die or giggle.
But my hosts never batted an eye. They were wonderful; their nerves must have been shattered, but, without allusion to projectiles, we proceeded with the soup course.
To ignore completely such a calamity takes praiseworthy poise, but I'd have felt more reorganized if they all had gone Japanese and bombarded the bird-cage with their rolls or, better still, if everyone had burst out laughing and cheered: "Good shot" or "It's a birdie" or "The last time Senator Omygosh did that he hit two canaries and killed the auk." Someone would surely have been that silly and that merciful a thousand miles south of the Charles.
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