CONSIDER THE LILLIES

During that delightful period which extends from the Last Examination to Class Day, the thoughts of the average overworked undergraduate turn toward his late instructors even less than they did during the earlier portion of the college year. His mental picture of his recent guides and philosophers and historians, assuming that he has one, displays them proceeding unanimously toward the Widener Library, preparing to spend a pleasant and profitable summer in the stacks.

A recent investigation, however, has disclosed the startling fact that out of the thousand-odd "officers of instruction and administration" connected with the University, seventy-five per cent, or approximately three-fourths, have disappeared from Cambridge within two hours after their last college appointment.

"Oh no, indeed," said one of these will o' the wisps, "I never stay for Class Day. The old grads would be the death of me. Please close the window as you go out."

"I'd be gone by now," confessed another, "but I have two boys taking entrance examinations. Just as soon as they finish--"

Anxious inquiry at the Office on the part of a nervous section hand the day after a final class raised the information that the head of the course was in Great Barrington, but that he expected to be in Cambridge for Columbus Day.

The moral of these three little fables, selected at random from a large number, is distressingly clear. Cambridge is not, in the summer time, a center of scholarly reflection and philosophic calm. It is on the contrary a barren desert, a dry waste in which there is no life but the feeble twittering of the summer school. And the reason for it all is that the average overworked professor, far from remaining to pursue his researches, follows as rapidly as he can the line of fastest departure for the seashore and the woods--precisely, in fact, like the average overworked undergraduate.