"DO YOU WANT ANY FRUIT, SORR?"

Although we live in such an age of modernness and conventionality, Harvard still is able to retain many of the peculiar characteristics of college life in days of old. She still has her college pumps - Massachusetts with her ancient gable windows yet remains as a memento of a former age - and there is Jones, the faithful janitor of many years, and Cleary, and John, the fruit man, who continually serve to remind us that we live apart in a world by ourselves, with its own peculiar laws and its own more peculiar characters. John, the fruit vender, has been a familiar object about college for one cannot tell how many years back; but there must have been a time when John was a brawny and ruddy emigrant from the old sod arriving at Castle Garden, full of the confidence of youth and Ireland. To every class now in college, at least, the mumbling, high-pitched tones of a voice crying, "Do you want any oranges, sorr?" have been long familiar. John is a philosopher in his way; as he himself says, he "has a good remembry," and while plodding his steady rounds with cart and basket, he has been wont to cogitate deeply the affairs of his own observation about college, and many a shrewd and simple grain of wisdom he has been able to distill in the process. John holds decided opinions on all the great questions of the day, and always exercises his privilege of the ballot, we may be sure, with due deliberation. If questioned, he can give a very graphic and remarkable history of the Christian religion, with astonishing exactitude as to dates and events, hitherto unknown to the learned world.

All this account John received once from a "mission," excepting perhaps some choice interpolations of his own derived from the affecting story of Cinderella and her slipper, and from some confused tales of Greek mythology. On the question of suicide John has a very striking and convincing theory. "It is two toimes as bad to kill yourself," says he, "as to kill any outher mon. If you kill any outher mon, you can repint, but you can never repint whin you have killed yoursilf." John says there was once a man here at Harvard who tried to make people think that men came from monkeys. "What was his name, John?" "I have forgott'n, sorr." "Was it Darwin?" "Ah! yes, Dorwhin. Well, this man went to Californy and dug in the ground twenty feet - twenty feet, sorr! and he came upon a skull of a mon that looked jist like a monkey's and thin again jist like a mon's. And so he thought that mon must have come from monkeys. But, belikely the sea came in wan toime and covered up this mon, and that's why they found him there; but he wasn't a monkey.

"Saint Patrick was a good mon and an eddicated mon, but he didn't drive the snakes out of Ireland - for there never were any snakes in Ireland.

"There is no such thing as a burning hell, - only a purget'ry. Everything on this world was made for mon. He rules over all the birds and the beasts and his wife. Women are not the equals of men, for they can't keep secrets. Go to your 'sacred student,'" says John, "and tell him you have killed a mon, and nobody will ever know it; tell it to a woman, and it will be known in 'foive days.'

"Wance," when John was a boy in Ireland, some eddicated folks came to the country and told them all about the steam-cars, and drew a "presen'tion" of them. But he didn't ever believe them until he went to "Clarney," and saw with his own eyes the wonders related. So people ought to believe a great many things they never see. "Why, if I should go to Oirland, and tell them all about class-day here, sorr, they would niver believe me!"

Liquor is what makes all the "potenteries;" a rum-seller can never be a happy man. John don't drink, and he says he's respected by all the students. He is now 48, and he "may live a dozen years yet." When he dies, he is "going home."