THE VAGABOND

"Let me repeat, gentlemen, that the keynote of the history of the Middle Ages is Unity."

"Remember, gentlemen, that in those days everything was slow, slow, in-con-ceivably slow."

Vag was sure those had been the exact words although he hadn't heard them since long ago when he was a miserable Freshman with a deathly fear of taking cuts. But he could still remember perfectly how the lecturer had looked, sitting on the corner of the New Lecture Hall desk, driving home each point with gesticulations of the pointer.

As a matter of fact, Vag thought, as he ransacked his memory, those two sentences were about all of the contents of the course he remembered. Some damn battle in 732 and an emperor crossing the Alps to kiss a Pope's big toe, that was about the sum of the facts he had gleaned.

And yet Vag knew he'd learned a lot from the course. Not facts, no, but a certain savoir-faire that had served him in the best of stead in all the courses he had taken. He had picked up the knack of taking lecture notes and he had discovered that you could and should get away with a minimum of reading. He had learned how to tell what was the important part of a lecture or a chapter. The course had taught him how to get down to work and how to organize a disturbing disarray of dates and names in an orderly sequence. Perhaps most important of all, the endless succession of weekly, bi-weekly, tri-weekly "quizzes" had taught him of necessity how to pass tests; even now, whenever he starts writing an exam Vag thinks of another sentence of that same lecturer: "In an hour examination, gentlemen, time is of the essence." Yes, he really owed a lot to that course.

So tomorrow morning Vag will temporarily discard his reading period slothfulness and at 9 o'clock he will walk into New Lecture Hall, take off his hat, and hear Professor Roger Bigelow Merriman, God of the course for two decades, give his last lecture in History 1.