Now that the merry mid-years are holding high carnival in our midst, we are, or ought to be, capable of appreciating the agony of the man who finds himself confronted by some phrase of a dead or unfamiliar living language which he cannot, for the life of him, translate. No true Harvard man, however, will give up the attempt to construe a sentence because of any such trivial obstacle as total ignorance of its meaning. A good guess is not without its value, and if the guesser fails to hit within forty rows of apple trees of his mark, - why, it makes no difference. A total omission would have been fully as disastrous.

In another column will be found a most amusing collection of conjectures. One pauses, even in the midst of his laughter, to wonder how sub-freshmen could have acquired so happy a faculty of snap-shot answering before going through the collegiate apprenticeship which most of us have served. But practice makes perfect, and the time may come when these same men will be able to enter a course at the mid-years, and, without purchasing a book, read the section by pure force of faultless sight translation and blindly audacious guessing, as was actually done in a classical course a few years ago.