The Student Vagabond

It must have been in April that Susan B. Anthony first taught men that suffrage is the badge of all our race. When spring comes into the land and leaves it "so soft, so warm, so bloomin' blue" men are like to be caught unawares and say things they don't quite mean. Especially at such times are they wont to confer upon women powers which are not theirs to possess. And--for such are women--they will not help them in their blindness. The Vagabond would like leave to amplify this thought, for in the past, he, along with countless others, has been in error upon this subject of the powers of spring.

He recently went hence in search of those greener pastures that lie beyond the ranges. He has watched, and seen, and observed, and noted many things on his quest the which he wishes to place before his audience this gay spring morning.

Spring brings out the doxy in a woman. This word doxy is a perfectly respectable word for the Vagabond found it in a Supreme Court decision handed down by a most learned judge. In the naked puritanism of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary it means "an undesirable sweetheart," one of those beguiling paradoxes into which the tortured paths of puritanism may lead us. But for those beyond the academic halls it signified merely a woman who is "no better than she ought to be."

The Vagabond drove by hills and valleys, through mill towns and the country seats of the mighty. He tarried at metropolitan hostelries and rural inns. He ran by rivers at twilight and by factories in the glare of noon. Mountains shouldered out of the plains in front and fell away to the horizons behind. He saw the sun catch the chromium glint, of the skyscraper and he watched a single pine tear the rising moon to shreds on a distant hill. And always by the side of old and winding roads, on the kerbs of four-width highways, red dress. On steps, in doorways, by the side of old and winding roads, on the kerbs of four-width highways. And always as her laugh rang through the twilight or her glance shone as the golden bar of heaven the Vagabond saw some poor wight follow after as Merlin followed the gleam.

In the past times the Vagabond has written of spring as a season of roaring brooks, thawing snows, bursting buds, foaming mugs, a yellow moon, drifting music, and charming laughter. But it is none of these, delightfully as he said so. Nor yet was Tennyson correct when, with awful Victorian punctilio, he wrote of a dove and a young man's fancy. It is only a time when for a few weeks a man will spend his pay check on poor movies, bad beer, a rented canoe, and a ride on a roller coaster. And all because the shrubs grow greener upon the Lorelei in spring. Poets and songsters have been wrong; but the rugged, hard-headed, unsentimental Angle-Saxons in their far-off wisdom had a four letter word for it.