Let those who are wont to season the morning's meal with the Attic salt of the Vagabond brace themselves for a more pungent spice today. For this morning the Vagabond is not Touchstone but Hamlet; the cap and bells are put away, and sables are the wear. A great man is passing from our midst: at nine o'clock this morning in New Lecture Hall, Professor C. K. Webster is delivering his last lecture before leaving Harvard College, and the Vagabond would give him homage and Godspeed.

Yet it is not merely for one man that the Vagabond is moved to unwonted sobriety: with the departure of Professor Webster a long line of the illustrious of history are going too. Returning every Spring to Harvard, he has put sense and motion into what were letters on a printed page, and the shadows of an age that is past, a time that is done have moved among us for a time with the life of contemporaries. Other and excellent lecturers there are at Harvard, but no one else who could reveal more by a roguish shrug, by an ironically poised understatement, than a volume with footnotes. Castlereagh and Talleyrand, ravelling and unravelling the maze at Vienna, the first Napoleon and the third, playing with the bright counters of empire, Victoria with her angel and Bismarck with the door-knob in his hand;--we have hear about them often, but only known them once. We shall hear about them again, but nevertheless they are going. And for this the Vagabond laments.

Too often we hear the remark that Harvard put a premium on scholarship at the expense of teaching ability. The Vagabond does not care to argue the point; he only regrets that a man who so well combines both talents should be leaving the University, that once again a Jonah is being swallowed up in Wales. Who in History 1 will so well uphold the traditions established by Professor Merriman in the first half, including the excellent one of making the late-coming Freshman acutely conscious of his low place in the scale of things? After this morning there will be only impressions of a booming voice, a collar, and many lectures that made dead men dance and gave that sense of the past which is the best gift of the historian. The Vagabond can offer no better advice to his readers than to join the Freshman in their early trek this morning, and hear Professor Webster on "The Organization of World Peace." Often in the past the Vagabond has written "the Vagabond will go today to hear . . ." purely as a formal phrase, but this morning he means it. And today he can close in no better way than by saying not "Good-bye," but "Till we meet again."