The following article by Luclen Price '07, is a printed through the courtesy of the Alumni Bulletin.

"'Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair' sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything." Plato: Republic, 401.

September smelts its autumnal ore in skies of glowing gold. The cicada shrills, a drowsy not steals into the crickets' chime, elm leaves rust toward the pensive melancholy of their yellowing. Such rites of the year's decay are reminders of the academic year's renewal. It is time to go back to school, and this week six hundred lucky Harvard undergraduates, having returned to their studies, live in two of the most stately new schoolhouses over built in America, houses so beautiful one would think that after having once lived in them the rest of life would be exile. They have cost millions, and millions are to be spent. Why this lavish outlay in college already richly endowed. It is in the hope contriving and intellectual climate ever more friendly to that mysterious ferment which here and there causes to rise in some human breast the yeast of a creative life-purpose.

In the Old Days

Mysterious this ferment surely is. A spring is not securely basined in marble, it may bubble through the neighboring turf; and spiritual ferment is often generated by studies quite outside college courses. A man in the Harvard class of 1908, who later distinguished himself, once told me that on a November day, when the Yale game was being played in New Heaven, he sat in a leather armchair beside a fire of logs in the library of the Union, from after breakfast until dusk, reading Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Autumn loured in cloudy skies and mourned in the gusty wind, steps scffed along the board-walks, football songs were whistled, the oak door slammed; it all sounded as from a dream. He was living in a remote heroic world. That was the days when-the intellectual passion was kindled in him, when he promised himself that he would be somebody. He kept his word. It is in the silent places that such resolutions are taken, and there, too, the decisive battles are lost or won.

Before these fortunate young men move in, let us inspect their new abodes whilst we can still do so without infringing privacy, and the better to understand what we are seeing let us look also into Harvard's House Plan, which begins this month.

Eights Slice of College

Cut a loaf of bread into eight slices. Lay one slice flat, and on it set the other seven upright. That loaf is the total of college undergraduates. The horizontal slice is the freshman class; the seven vertical slices are the residents of the seven Houses. Two of the new House Plan buildings, Dunster House and Lowell House, are ready for use; a third, Eliot House, are ready for use; a third, Eliot House, is begun. In each of the two finished Houses about 300 men, from the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, begin study this week. This year the freshmen remain in the group of dormitories built for them beside the Charles. Next year's freshman class will be housed in the yard, and the present Freshman Dormitiories will be converted into three House Plan units; Smith Halls for one, Gore and Standish Halls for another, and McKinlock, with additions still to be built, for a third. Eliot House, now being built on the site of the demolished power plaut at the corner of Memorial Drive and Boylston St., fronting the river (and to be finished by next autumn), will be a fourth unit, and three older dormitories of the Mt. Auburn St. region. Randolph and Russell Halls, with Westmorly Court, will be a fifth, making in all seven Houses. One more new dormitory will be built in the Yard for the Freshmen. It will stand in the space bounded by Massachusetts Ave, on the south, Wardsworth House on the west. Grays Hall and the Widener Library on the north, and Professor Palmer's residence on the east. Thus each year's freshman class will be kept a unit in the Yard, af-

ter which, for their remaining three undergraduate year, they will be apportioned among the seven Houses.

This year's resident in Dunster and Lowell Houses have been chosen by House Master and tutors with a view to each House having a typical slice from the human layer-cake of the College. Certain tutors will live in the Houses, others will have conference rooms in them and live elsewhere, but every student-in a given House will have at least on resident tutor. These methods are admittedly experimental. It is hoped that each House will in time develop an individuality and attract students by their major interests.

Dining Halls Good

The desertion of the big-dining halls for cafeterias has been a social disintegration of the College during the past decade and a half. The House Plan meets this with slightly dining halls and promise of excellent food. It also meets the situation with a little Marxian economic determinism. All student members of the House will be charged a minimum rate of $8.50 a week for meals. This will entitle them to any 14 meals they choose. Additional meals will be paid for at the rate of 30 and 40 cents for breakfast, 60 cents for lunch, and 80 cents for dinner. For the student who takes his 21 meals in the House the charge will be $10.50 per week. The waiters will not be students.

What, for the present, are the main differences to be expected under the House Plan? Undergraduates of the three upper classes will be grouped by Houses. Living and eating in the same building, they will see more of their tutors and of one another, and there can be more intermingling of under and upper-classmen. Athletics will become more inter-house and less inter-class, although the University athletic contests will go on as usual. Resident tutors will not be proctors. In fact, there will be no proctors in the Houses. To make resident tutors disciplinary officers would scarcely promote that easy and familiar intercourse between student and tutor which the House Plan is designed to institute. The tables in the dining halls will seat from two to eight persons, where one sits being it matter of choice. Another innovation will be the greater frequency of evening conferences between students and tutors.

What of Clubs?

What will become of the undergraduate clubs? The older ones which sink their roots into the social loam and financial subsoil of the surrounding community, academic Cantabrigian and urbane Bostonese, will no doubt go on much as usual, at least for the present.