YOUTH AT ANY PRICE

At mention of that composite, non-existent creature--the college man--one never thinks of furrowed brow or snow white locks. A dapper youth with ruddy face and varnished hair, in some non-chalant pose upon a Hart, Schaffner--& Marx background, is the popular conception of this mystical creature. The reading public will find its ideal rudely shattered by an article in December "Sribner's" called "A Freshman Again at Sixty".

The veteran youth of this essay is a business man who, facing the problem of retirement, solved it by entering the University of North Carolina. He had no trouble, it seems, falling into the spirit of the enterprise. For "skipping" classes he was soon hauled up before the dean. It rather shocks one's idea of propriety to think of the dean addressing an humble penitent "Venerable Sir!"

Ponce de Leon had his filng in search of the isle of Bimini. In modern times science promises synthetic youth. But rejuvenation by the academic method seems the more popular way. Even Harvard has its "Old Dog" basking anew in the sunlight of knowledge and the shadow of an incognito. If retired bond salesmen and cotton merchants should take any wholesale notion to imitate these examples, the "Freshman Red Book" may come to look like an advertising handbook for Colgate's Shaving Cream.