A few weeks ago, it will be remembered, Prof. Sumner of Yale made some remarks in a lecture on free trade which were at once taken up as a challenge by advocates of protection. The superintendent of the thread mills at Willimantic, Conn., embraced the opportunity to invite a number of Yale students to inspect the mills. Free transportation and a free lunch induced upwards of two hundred and fifty students to accept the invitation. The excursion was a grand success. The trip was a pleasant one, and the Yale students were much pleased with what they saw. The mills alone were well worth the journey, surrounded as they were by every evidence of happiness and prosperity. The delegation of students left much impressed with the excellent management and the generous courtesy of the Willimantic Company. The Yale News devoted a page of its issue to a glowing description of the trip and all seemed lovely. Yale was henceforth to be the bulwark of protection and Prof. Sumner had lost his profession. But by and by a cloud arose on the horizon. The protectionists had been too fast in drawing their conclusions. It seems that there is one man left at Yale besides Prof. Sumner who remains unconvinced, and he has the bad taste to write a long letter to the New York Evening Post saying so. This graceless young man, forgetting the courtesy of the superintendent and the happiness of the operatives, takes an altogether mercenary view of the matter. He calculates that the orange trees and other luxuries at Willimantic costs the country annually over a million dollars, and seems to think this is too much. This is not a fitting return for a free excursion and a free lunch.