Premature Eliot Housewarming Party Proves Wet Affair as Firemen Arrest Speeding Flames--Only One Engine Hurt

It was exactly 9.17 o'clock last night when Charles Apted, caretaker of University buildings, heard watchman Herman's whistle. Mr. Apted had been on his sun porch listening to the radio but immediately seized his coat and followed the fire engines. It turned out that some of the scaffolding in Eliot House, of which Professor Merriman is to be master, had caught on fire. There are 971 rooms in the new building, and students attracted by the blaze bothered firemen and the police by peering from the windows into the courtyard. They were admonished to throw no bricks. No bricks were thrown, but damage resulted when an incautious chauffeur carelessly removed the rear end of an opposing fire-wagon.

According to authorities on the scene, the fire was not permitted to assume serious proportions. Once out there arose two schools of thought concerning the origins of the Great Fire. One, headed by Pete Hartwell, of the night watch, doggedly maintained that there was no fire at 9 o'clock, when he made his diurnal round. His feeling about the matter was that a heated salamander in a fit of pique had started the whole business. Mr. Phillips, one of Mr. Hartwell's colleagues, contended that it could have been nothing else than an irresponsible gas saw, which had somehow broken loose. Mr. Apted was non-committal. Revenge motives failed to figure.

The firemen, defending themselves from the cheers of the Freshmen, who attended in a body, baptised the gathering, while students strolled about, souvenir hunting. Several squadrons of policemen, fearing an informal repetition of Saturday night's affair, also attended in a body. As silently as they had come, the fire engines withdrew at 10.19 o'clock.