It is the Vagabond knows, three-hundred-and-five feed long, one-hundred-and-thirteen feet wide, and the tower rises one-hundred-and-ninety feet above the Delta, but he is not appalled by that. It was on this Delta that Josiah Quincy paid his sixpence in 1821 to shoot at a turkey, the same stately Josiah Quincy who made the parting senior, having the customary cake and wine at Wadsworth House with his president, feel as though he had drunk "with Prince Metternich at Johannesberg a bottle of his choicest vintage." There on the Delta the Freshmen and Sophomores held their annual football game, with the upper classes ranged on the stone posts and square-sharp rails of the fence, lightly chatting with demure sisters and belles from Boston as they watched the combatants work out a mutual destiny. But the desecration that is progress overtook the spot, and the Memorial was erected "in honor of those sons of Harvard who served in defence of the Union, more especially to commemorate the sacrifice of those who had laid down their lives in that cause ...."

The Vagabond would never take issue with Harvard's President and her Fellows who considered Memorial Hall "the most valuable gift which the University has ever received, in respect alike to coast, daily usefulness, and moral significance." He would remind no one of Professor James, who lecturing in Emerson D, would glance across the heads of his listeners at the Gothic tower and exclaim: "Gentlemen, take Memorial Hall for instance. What else could you take it for!" Nor would he visit Memorial Hall sixty years after, to see the deserted dining hall, cramped Sanders Theatre, the squalid ruin of false tiffany. For the Vagabond sees only the frost-blushed ivy on a fine full day in the dawnlight, remembers only the inspiring sight of the citadel lighted blue green by moonlight and snow, and he rejoices in his retreat.