IT is well known that in the English Universities every student has a set of rooms, where he sleeps, studies, gives choice breakfasts to his friends, and wines of an evening to large parties. Englishmen coming to this country are much surprised to find that here, as a rule, two students instead of one rent a room and its accompanying bedrooms. Such a system no doubt has its pleasures. With a chum a man who is of social disposition is certain not to be left for any great length of time alone. More visitors are said to come to see two than to see one. Besides, - a most obvious advantage, - the expenses are lessened, so that a man of moderate means with a chum can take any room in the Yard he wishes. But, notwithstanding such arguments, a feeling is beginning to prevail, more widely now than for some years past, that it is desirable to room alone. Possibly the feeling has always existed, but is become noticeable now, as until lately it was almost impracticable to secure a single room. Within a year or two the rule has been made that the rooms in Grays shall be occupied by one student only. In other buildings, also, rooms appear to be given to a student who applies without a chum as freely as to him who applies with one.

If a man is very intimate with another it is often possible to make an arrangement by which they shall both enjoy the luxury of rooming alone, and yet be at no great distance from each other. As far as entertaining a great number of visitors is concerned, the under-classman may think it an advantage that tells wonderfully in favor of a chum, but a larger experience probably informs him that there are many inconveniences attending such a way of living. Very often, too, it happens that, from no desire of your chum's or your own, company men drop in because your room is a convenient and pleasant loafing-place.

Although in most of the buildings two bedrooms to a study lessen the inconveniences that used to exist, yet they all are by no means done away with. Unless a man retires to his bedroom, and such an action is an invitation to his friends to leave, he is never sure of a moment in which to study uninterruptedly. At Vassar they are so unmannerly as to do this; it is, in fact, rendered almost unavoidable by the huddling of five young lady chums into one study-room. To the studious, this system of chumming does more injury than the most earnest efforts of the instructors in the lecture-room can repair. Never free from interruption either by your chum or some caller, asked continually to do something foreign to the work that demands your attention, your mind at last takes on a desultory habit, to overcome which great energy is needed, - energy, too, that ought to be employed in studying, not in bringing your mind into a fit condition for work.

The expense of rooming alone is never so great that it could not be borne without real hardship. And such a way of living could not but be in the interests of study. It is a pity, therefore, that the rooms in the new buildings should have been designed for chums, having, as they do, more rooms in a suite than any except the most luxurious of us could dispose of, if rooming alone.