UNDERGRADUATE HABITS.

Many a care-free undergraduate whose studies are his least concern assumes that a miraculous transformation will take place in his habits after he has "settled down to work." He looks on college as a pleasant interlude between the seclusion of his schooldays and the prosaic realities of a business world. He hears too frequently that his undergraduate years are to be the gayest and freest of his life, and he does not hesitate to devote them to the pursuit of pleasure. This undergraduate is, fortunately, one of a rather small type, and his ideas of fun are frequently strangely perverted. In consequence, he accustoms himself to much that as a graduate he intends assiduously to avoid.

Such a happy attitude would be far less prevalent if there existed more generally a truer and fuller conception of the real significance of a habit formed. "Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so small scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for each fresh dereliction by saying, "I wont count this time." Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it, but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out." In this quotation from Professor James there exists an implied but none the less effective warning to those undergraduates who thoughtlessly go to work to form habits, with no real appreciation of the difficulty that awaits them when the time comes to "swear off."