The costs of education, like the old gray mare, "ain't" what they used to be. The price of learning has reached for the ceiling along with the price of good liquor. Education nowadays is "a great industry." The Board of Education of New York City sat itself down quite casually the other day and adopted the largest building program in the history of Gotham's school system, providing for the construction of ninety buildings and the improvement of school playgrounds at a total cost of about $68,000,000. Just like that--nonchalant like! Also, the other day, the Registrar of Columbia University grabbed himself a column of space in the New York press to point out, matter-of-factly, that Columbia's annual budget has been increased from $820,000 to $11,500,000 since the turn of the century, a hardly-to-be-sneezed-at-gain of 1400 per cent.

But there was a time when tuition was $12. Arthur Train, successful lawyer and novelist, has written a super-biography entitled "Puritan's Progress." It is a biography of America told in terms of the Train family. Mr. Train's own undergraduate career at Harvard, twoscore years ago, seems to have been rather lonely, punctuated chiefly by one glorious trip to Boston which ended in an almost unconscious invasion of the dean's study. But forget Cambridge of forty years ago and turn to Brown when Mr. Train's father was an undergraduate at Providence. Here is the bill he paid: To Tuition  $12.00 Room rent  3.00 University Library  1.00 Steward's salary  2.00 Servants' hire, printing, etc  2.00 Repairs  .55 Commons bill 8 weeks, $1.62 per week  12.96 Public fuel  .50 Interest due to May 1st  .68 Absent from prayers without excuse--once; absent from recitations without excuse--twice  .06   $34.75

--Boston Transcript.