The president of the board of aldermen raised his left hand until it was fourteen when his wife convinced him that it is better to choose a college early than to try to make sense out of Aldous Huxley so they married and raised children who raised hell ten feet toward heaven by gilding the front stairs of the devil's bathing apartment so that he slipped on the wet paint--and it is really not often that the devil slips. And that my children (as the only honest man in the town said) is something. Nor was he completely without a certain sense of the fitness of things. No doubt he owes much to the fact that his earliest reading had been in the classics, Zane Gray, Jane Austin and Octavus Roy Cohen. But the significant fact remains, gentlemen, that no romantic writer of his ilk could have existed west of Worcester without feeling the subtle and pervading influence of the fin desiecle spirit on his whiskey sours. Changing his verse every ten years, and here is a significant fact, that he never changed his underwear half so often as he changed his verse, convinces me that he was after all much more in the Neolithic tradition than was his friend and contemporary, the secretary and treasurer of the board of aldermen.

This with no assistance from spectator or from my able associates and faculty I have gained from study and contemplation of English literature in preparation for various and sundry final examinations. And I think I have accomplished quite a good deal, realizing that my whole future as well as about nine tenths of my past depends upon such a knowledge. Did you know that the Pre-Raphaelites were Pre-Raphaelitic? The significance of the fact is vast--or, and here I quote a gentleman from Dartmouth, what have you?

Now the rumor is that the Lampoon has seen fit to parody this weekly Ziet-Blatt (my German A does fade) in a burst of wanton wit. And I am certainly proud to know it. When the Lampoon hears of anything to parody that thing is certainly established. I feel positively aged in the wood at the honor. Sometime I shall parody the Lampoon and then we'll all be happy, won't we, children, to use the words of Minnie Mistletoe who broadcasts the Nightly. Nothing for Nice Tots from KTX or is it IOU?

On his little humor tree

The Ibis sits and winks at me

Give the Ibis just one poke

Cackle, cackle--Exit joke.

Which reminds me that there is a new book of verses underneath the bough and all that sort of thing on sale at the University Book Store, that last haven for so many Harvard bards and books. And I have read the book and find it excellent. Never in months have I been so certain that a goose could lay a golden egg. And all this because I could not see one funny line in the whole work except those which run

Gin and Jill went up the hill

Looking rather proud.

Jill alone came down the hill

Wrapped within a shroud

which are very good, or is that another book? Anyway you'll like this. I am sure, for I have the worst taste in humor of any person I know.

By the way I must raise a finger of score at those who dislike the sketch of the new chapel. They certainly do not know their architecture. And if anything will ever penetrate the heavens in search of a just creator the steeple on the new chapel certainly will. It will be one more point of interest beside the glass flowers.