The Student Vagabond

Cold snap and cold brains leave the Vagabond with nothing to do but place feet on the andirons and consider the pretzel divinities of yesterday: the old beery Gods of Examinations that were so glorious until Mencken and the literary smart set made sauerkraut out of them. In that mind's eye of his that has enfolded so much nebulosity, the Vagabond at rest watches with the sad sublimity of a Greek stoic the passing of Harvard into tabloid education, the riveting of its density to gilded monuments of steel and brick. In the dim light that gleams through the halos of its many Saints, he watches Bluebooks and blaming youth ruffie the innocuous desuetude of Memorial Hall. In both new and old, he sees halfbaked meats and widow's weeds coldly furnishing the Examination table. It is not remarkable that he looks forward with a whitening eye to the dreary 1,252,800 seconds that remain before the first lecture of 1931. Memories are bled by time, even that one bloodstained memory of the time be filled three exultant Bluebooks with thin wavy lines.

Down in New Haven the Ear of Young America harkens with Harkness back to an older Old World tradition. Three Reading Periods (stand and bow) are sufficient at least to blow the foam off a jugged brew. Three Reading Periods (roar from the pit) provide plenteous days to sink back into the Mediaeval and quaint Villonesque depravity. Against this melodrama. Harvard offers One Reading Period (now over) and the cheery blue dome of Lowell House reassuring the faithful that God's in his heaven and speaking to His Chosen The Vagabond endorses... and hibernates in the pure driven snow that has drifted into Memorial Hall with the Bluebooks.