OUR sacred precincts have been invaded and the architectural eye has been critically cast upon our College buildings! No sooner had we departed for our quiet homes and the coast was clear, than a part of the Juniors in Architecture, M. I. T. (so says the Spectrum) come to Cambridge to view the architectural splendors which beautify our Yard. They noticed, in University, "the lower flights of stairs, the steps of the second run of which are built into the wall about two feet, and project therefrom about five, without any support at the outer end." The Spectrum doubtless makes this remark in all kindness, but we confess to a self-reproachful twinge. Have we not mounted that "run" thousands of times, and never thought about their projection, but only that each step was bringing us to hopeless "dead" or glorious "rush"? Graceful Holworthy and airy Hollis and Stoughton were passed by without comment; doubtless because their architectural beauty is all latent. Memorial Hall may have struck some tyro in architecture as being a little out of proportion, - one-sided perhaps. Let him banish all such doubts from his mind, for "the building is exactly symmetrical on each side of its longitudinal axis." From the same source we learn that "the Dining Hall is to be used for the Commencement Supper." When?

WE were disappointed in the "Beautiful Slave," which the College Herald parades at the head of its "Literary" department. Its badness is hardly even enough to make it pleasant reading; yet there are a few passages for which striking is perhaps the best term. For instance, the extraordinary manifestation of second-sight in the first stanza, -

"And the chicken brood, and the house dog, too,

Had skulked away from all human view."

Or, does the author intend to put himself out of the category of human beings?

"The farmer's child, in her sixteenth year,

By the open window was sitting near."

Near what, in Heaven's name? Afterward,

"With a water-pail, and a basket filled,

With her rustic song so cheerily trilled,

She crossed the fields - "

Poor thing! Her hands must have been rather full, unless, as is suggested by the text, she carried her rustic song in her basket. She finds the old man and disclaims weariness.

"No! papa, I came through the meadows there

Where I plucked these flowers so preciously rare,

And I do not mind that I tired grew,

For the toil is sweet that I do for you."

She returns,

"Filling her basket with buttercup blooms

To put in the parlor and other rooms."

Buttercups in reaping time are, in the author's own words, "preciously rare." But the young woman is ambitious and goes about her drudgery,

"Putting up proud thoughts in the shape of dreams,

Lining the present with golden gleams."

"Putting up" is happy but very puzzling, suggesting a colloquialism.

She leans her head on the unmade spread and wants to go to college; but she can't.

"And the only books that float by her eyes

Are the sloping fields and the open skies."

This is very hard to comprehend. We see that the first line might refer to a family scrimmage. But nobody ever heard of a field - and a sloping field at that - floating by a girl's eyes; at least, in this part of the country.

"With her queenly brow and her sunburned hands

By the cooking-stove she silently stands,"

possibly finding it difficult to do so without them.

"And tends to the meat and potatoes there,

Fixed to the stove with a vacant stare."

This is indeed a climax. Our blood boils with sympathy. Why was she fixed? Who fixed her? And why was a vacant stare substituted for a jack-chain? Why, the Inquisition was a fool to this!

THE Grand Duke Alexis has presented to the University of Michigan thirty volumes of the history and educational interests of Russia. - N. Y. Times.

THE Seminary Budget is the name of a four-paged paper published four times a year by some nice little girls in Mr. Perry's Seminary, Sacramento, California. Our first impulse was to drop it in the "dead" exchange basket; but suddenly we came upon this: "We are ready to exchange with all papers of high merit and literary worth." After such readiness, we can't refuse our aid to the education of these maiden Californians.