The thought of hoary tradition lifting its venerable head up from the Yard is almost an essential to one's speculations about Harvard University, the oldest institution of learning in the land.

Compared to the burden the moss-encrusted universities of the Old World have to bear, three hundred years is but as a day; but in a civilization that has lustily risen--and, say some, is already declining--in just that span, Old Harvard has a right to indulge itself in habits that have grown up with the years, habits that have become traditions, habits that, perhaps, have lost all trace of their original reason. More than any other college in America, that aged seat of learning is justified in stroking its long grey beard, settling back in its easy chair, looking out over the City of Boston, and exasperating moderns by its antique idiosyncrasies, such as, for example, the ringing of the seven o'clock bell to summon bleary-eyed undergraduates to a compulsory chapel that has been dead these fifty years.

But all's not quiet along the Charles! The spirit of restiveness is in the air. It's not the House Plan that makes us think so; it's something much more vital. It was recently announced to a startled world that that same old bell, the bell to which nine generations of sons of Harvard have awakened, is, by presidential decree, henceforth and forever more to be silent--gone forever.

As restless inhabitants of Reunion or West turn over in their beds these drear days, rudely called from the arms of Morpheus by the peal of Old Nassau, which seems even yet in the still, small hours of the morning to summon men to a ghostly service, they may innocently consider to themselves the sublime beauty and glorious value of ancient traditions. --The Princetonian.