The study of the loafer alone is worth a man's while. I have had themes late by reason of a janitor's carelessness in mislaying them when he dusted; because a sister borrowed them to show to a friend; because the hour the student expected to spend in preparation had been used up in getting a long-distance call over the telephone. What conviction has the ordinary excuse now for me? And what strange glimpses I have had of lives! The boy who lay for eighteen hours under the dead body of his mother in Kishineff, until the mob drew off; the girl who wrote of the two men who wished to marry her, pinning their photographs to the paper, and asked me which to choose--those are examples out of literally hundreds that linger in my conscious or subconscious memory. And on the other hand, what a delightful lass was she who defined aesthetic as "something to kill cats with," and illustrated her definition by the sentence "We gave the cat an aesthetic." --New Republic.