Letters That Might Have Been

Beacon Hill felt a thrill of horror creep up its asphalt as it became conscious of the most recent number of the New Yorker. Even the Back Bay may have quaked a little to discover its secretary of the navy quoted as writing to the president of Harvard College; "Dear Lawrence--Long a student of heraldry, I have satisfied myself that the only families north of the Mason and Dixon line entitled to bear arms are the Winthrops and Saltonstalls." This was apropos of the question of putting a coat of arms on the gable end of the new unit of the Harvard house plan, Adams House.

Unfortunately for the New, Yorker's story, aside from the facts that Mr. Adams is unaware of the difference (if there is any) between a cross potent and a dove proper, and did not write the quoted remarks, he had nothing to do with the correspondence on the subject of an Adams coat of arms. That was left entirely in the hands of his cousin Henry Adams. He simply regretted, speaking for the family, his inability to give what it did not possess. "Curiously enough, in the whole course of his letters to the Harvard authorities the name of no other Boston family was mentioned.

What then are we to think? Are these New Yorkers trying to take us down a peg? Have we at last come face to face with a much talked of spectre of contemporary existence? Inferiority complex, that's what it is. Put yourself in the place of those benighted New Yorkers. New York's drawing rooms are full of old southern kunnels. And they know where they came from. They haven't forgiven Cromwell yet for chopping off King Charles's head. And these Bostonians! Well, not everybody is a Mayflower descendant, but they have a way of looking as if they were. --Boston Herald.