Vacations are like beautiful ladies both rare and fleeting, especially when one has a bank account of eight cents, owes three and must eat some time. So I can remember very distinctly just what happened the last week of classes. There was Mencken and Brown and a ball game with more errors from eating peanuts than otherwise--also a Crime column which provoked someone to remark rather caustically, "So the Crimson now goes in for the 'say dearie' stuff." Which last completely floored me, since I had spent weeks of patient research in hunting down that particular epistle and expected to get at least the commendation of the English Department. I didn't get anything but seven days in Connecticut with a senior who had generals, a very bad disease, and a dog which had--well, it just loved to scratch.

In fact that dog had more methods of approaching a moving point in space than any person I have ever known in Emerson. He did it with the wariness of a Central Square duenna and the nonchalance of two Central Square duennas. I sat for hours and watched him. One does things like that on spring vacations. And then there is now the subtle excuse of being a behaviorist. All of which I must admit I am not, believing sincerely that most behaviorism is at best perfunctory.

And that belief I gained from reading a treatise on The Metabolism of Ups and Downs which my tutor suggested as a variation from Eighteenth Century Latitudinarianism and Its Effect on the Battle of Manila, or do you take two lumps? No. I cannot like T. S. Eliot for many reasons among which are these

(1) I do not understand him.

(2) I do not understand his poetry

(3) I do not know anyone who does.

Yet you will admit that this has a bit of the esotericism of T. S. Eliot, Merely pose, I assure you. I am much better at bridge. Now take the new books for sale on all and sundry stands in which are not alone the new rules, but even the newest comments by Work and Whitehead and all the other gentlemen of the green plush. For it seems that when one cuts high does win and that you just must know or the Ladies' Whist and Euchre (prize a doily isn't it just dear) will kick you down the back stairs of your local reputation and Mrs. J. De Riff Punkle will cut you every time you meet her at the linen counter. Such is the effect of bridge upon the mind American.

Though as Joe Cooke has so often said, "I may be wrong." At least I do admit than I am sometimes wrong. For it was only last Saturday that I was converted to Methodism by a lady who did so want me to get the "good things" at Harvard. And any religion which will help toward a cheap and sudden attainment of the "Good things" is immediately mine. Though at heart I remain a Baptist on the hard shell a Vermont Baptist deo volente.