The secretary of Harvard University recently issued a notice to the Cambridge students to the effect that he was willing to act as their second "next friend" in seeking summer employment for such of them as needed to work in order to support themselves. His offer, it appears, has drawn from the poorer class of men, some of them members of the medical, law and divinity schools, applications as varied as they are numerous. They want work for their heads or their hands, it matters little which so long as it pays their way.

The students from whom the applications come are said by the secretary to be of the most earnest and and industrious class. They are, many of them, country boys accustomed to hard work add patient efforts. Several of them are ready to go back into the field and swing the scythe or take care of horses and cattle. One is prepared by past experience to act as fireman on a locomotive, or conductor on a horse car. Another has been a conductor on a Pullman car and would like to be again, and a third wishes to be a clerk on a steamboat. At least a dozen are ready to be hotel clerks, or even waiters if no better opening offers. Among the many is one skilled in wood carving and quick in using the tools of the box maker. There are a number who wish places in counting-rooms, banks, offices, or as salesmen in branch stores at popular seashore resorts. The most numerous body are applicants for positions as tutors, either of boys fitting for college or of children whose parents wish them to learn to love science by intelligent observation of nature.

The project of the college officials is certainly one to be commended and aided by an intelligent community. If it is wise to aid the poor student by scholarships and loans of money it is even wiser to help him to use his vacation in such a way as to enable him to add to his income and at the same time to gain rest by a change of scene and occupation.

As the number of applications filed by the students is likely to be larger than the number of openings of the kind desired, the secretary will doubtless be glad to receive any kind of offer from those wishing to employ young men during the three summer months. Boston Post,