COATS,--LIVING AND DEAD

During the hectic days of registration, the memory of which is gradually fading like a bad dream, the voices of a few were heard protesting feebly against the necessity of filling a bond with the University. The protest was negligible beside the wholesale acceptance and approval of the majority of undergraduates who found the bursar's card transforming them into modern Aladdins by the mere signing of their names.

However real the sufferings of the six men out of every hundred who objected to the bond, a harking back to the University's early records shows encouraging proof of fiscal progress from that day to the present.

The term bills of students at Harvard College in Cambridge were for years met by the payment to the bursar of produce, live-stock, meat and occasionally "with various articles raked from the closets of undergraduate debtors." One man, later president of the college, settled his bill with an old cow, -- whose merits and value proved cause for a spirited dispute. The accounts of the fund for the first college building include the entry: "Received a goat, 30s, plantation of Watertown rate, which died."

The obsolete system suggests a treasure house of possibilities to the under graduate of today, who finds the regular payment of term bills somewhat annoying. There was that typewriter left by last year's occupant of your room in Thayer, which you lugged at much pains to the office in town to find it listed as "valueless". You might fool the bursar on that. Or the Webster's dictionary without a cover which looked like a first edition. The second hand book man said it was nothing of the sort and refused to take it if paid; but the authorities on Kirkland street wouldn't know the difference. Anyway, the scheme is worth a trial.