Mystic Dandruff

We liked Cambridge. We liked its great rambling quadrangles. We liked its utter lack of echoing, brick-bare dormitory halls. We liked the white colonial apartment doors, unpierced by mail slots for ad minions to thumb with circulars and manifestes. We liked the huge, gentlemanly apartments, with floors of oak and gleaming waxed rubber, with showers in every bathroom and two washbowls.

We liked the house libraries: one of them in every house, as intimate as the Christopher Wren room in Sanborn, but much larger, and containing every conceivable book for pleasurable perusal or routine research. We liked the tall-ceilinged fire-lit library in Eliot House, and the clamant Crimson library in Standish, and the goldleaf and wrought iron of Adams.

We liked the dining halls. We liked the comfortable unhurried digestion that is concomitant with impeccable service in long panelled walnut dining rooms, staffed with brisk and efficient waitresses in uniforms of English service. We liked the ladies whom the Corporation has managed to coerce into accepting the situations of head- waitresses; and the way in which they asked whether the dinner was good. We liked the printed menus and the good food, and the spotless napery.

We liked the commodious living rooms in every house, and we liked the way every one congregated there for a demi-taste which one is served there (courtesy of the Corporation) after lunch and dinner. We liked the way the morning papers are stacked at the entrance of the hall, with no more urgent a spur to the conscience than a mute, coin-filled plate on guard.

We liked the commodious living rooms in every house, and quadrangle, where the grass is as fine as a putting green, and men in the college can get an occasional sight or scent of flowers there in season. We liked the great, scroll-worked gates, and the tall arches. We liked the unreal pastel tints of the soaring domes, and we liked the formal garden effect of the trim-banked Charles.

In Cambridge there is a tempo, there is a serenity, there is calm accretion of culture and knowledge.

But, we ask, where is there a Boston Nugget, where will you find, brisk, boisterous, debonair academicians clad in comfortable corduroys and sweaters? Where will you get our hill-winds and our mountain air, our Appalachian snows, and Alpine sports? With all due gratitude for hospitality received, we choose Hanover. The beer is better for one thing. And the Brahmins of Boston don't get in your hair. The Dartmouth.