There are times for the Vagabond, as for every man, when the apple turns to ashes on his palate, when the burden and the mystery prey on his spirit. He turns from the shallow comfort of the penny-a-liners to the mordant voice of Housman. Like Archduke's cousin, he sees the symbol of it all in a handfull of dust. Like Swift, he celebrates his birthday as a time of mourning, and all neighbors join in. Life is a poor thing, bitter and mocking and the phrase of Solon runs in his mind.

But his comfort comes at last not in the dusty books of cynics, but in things of greater moment. He looks out from the hills and moors of Gloucester, where the waves and the great gulls shoreward go and love and fame to nothingness do sink. Or he turns to a nearer wonderland, to a walled garden where the lilacs, now past their fullest bloom, but lovely still, run in purple and mauve along the quiet walks. A rampart of hills slope toward the sunset, and their sides are covered with the flower called the torch azalea, whose scentless beauty can teach the Vagabond more than all the sages can. Further on there is a valley where the sentinel pines stand black against a setting of green leaved oaks and hemlocks. There is also a brook, and horsemen clatter over the wooden bridge that bestrides it. A group of boys are sailing boats in a duckpond, and the birds retreat to the far end, haughtily ignoring the invasion of their domain. In such a place even the shoddiest of men take on graciousness, and old ladies forget to prattle of their favorite ailments. Young men reveal the subtle ways of Spring in just that proper tilt of the hat. And, inevitably in May, flaunting their best clothes and their best looks along the lanes, "wymmen waxeth wonder proude." Twilight comes in on silver feet, and the Vagabond, in mellower mood, has a kindly thought even for the penny-a-liners.

This is not a vision of forgotten, far off things, nor is it a gratuitous advertisement of the local charms of New Hampshire. It is the Arnold Arboretum, at the other side of Boston, on any Spring day, a place more talked of than visited by Harvard men, though even the Yard with its trees and its few remaining grassplots and its memories must yield to it. They little know of Harvard who only Harvard know, and have not seen the lilacs in bloom, or that side of the university where beauty is more than scholarship, and pedantry is harmlessly confined to the Latin labels on the trees.