The Vagabond spent a bad day of it yesterday. The reading period is dull going for such as he what with no lectures and every one either away from Cambridge or hidden somewhere in the stacks. He spent the morning wandering about the Yard trying to seek consolation in self communion. When that failed he invented a new game which served well enough for a time; he tried counting the bricks as the masons were laying up the walls of the new chapel, but he soon lost track. At last in desperation he dropped in to a house for lunch. There were three affable young fellows just sitting down and he helped them in the hope that they might provide some balm for the jaded spirit.

After a few tentative beginnings one of them said, "At least there is one good thing about the Reading Period, the Vagabond can't write about lectures he's going to." Conversation began to pick up, here evidently was a subject upon which they could all speak with feeling. "I wouldn't mind it if the old fool would just put down the day's lectures and have done, but he seems to feel it incumbent upon him to unburden the secrets of his soul and his subconscious mind." "Yes," the first member was taking up the thread of the yarn, "and by the time he's written half a column he is so wound up in himself that he forgets where the lecture is or who is talking."

The Vagabond turned hopefully toward the third, hitherto silent, member of the party. "I never have read the column." The Vagabond pushed away his plate of humble pie and departed, the world in ashes. The cruel words rang loudly in his old ears and when he thought thereon he wept.

To those three and to all those others who are his critics the Vagabond would like to make reply.

He doesn't write to please the students, he doesn't write particularly to get people to go to lectures, and quite frankly that familiar sentence "today the Vagabond will go to hear--" is merely a terminal convenience, a tradition much like the King opening parliament. Nor is the Vagabond a cheap penny columnist, no adviser to the love lorn he! He writes for the same reason the man thumbed his nose at the Queen, it seems to be the best thing to do at the time. It is a great satisfaction to him to dash off the manifold things that come to mind, and it isn't his fault if they publish it. It is, of course, quite natural that he should feel badly at the conversation he heard, no man likes to have his nearest, dearest thoughts the butt of many an idle jest. But he is used to the indiscretion of youth, he knows how they speak in the wrath of the moment and he will pardon them. If they seek not pardon it matters little, he will go on writing whether or no. He will continue to get times wrong, to get places mixed, to misspell the names of professors. Technicalities are not for the majestic corridors of his soul. Harvard was made for the Vagabond to do as he liked with, not the Vagabond for Harvard. If you gentlemen do not tread lightly likely as not he will pack up, and blaze a trail across the mountains to Beloit.