In the reveries inspired by a sweet pipe-smoke, a pipe-smoke like unto those described in mild, mellow, expensive advertising, the Vagabond has often pondered the decay of magazine editors. Following a train of thought induced by mention of Messers George Horace Lorimer, Bernarr McFadden, and Lincoln Kirstein, he has publicly bewailed the loss of effusions such as those of the youthful Lincoln Steffens. What an opening there is for editors who can today, blud-goon graft and corruption with sweetness and light, as others did of yore, all with the accompaniment of sounding trumpets and falling walls. There is an intolerable dearth of succulent revelations and fat, juicy accusation, of harrowing, sordid, revolting, delightful delineation of sin and portraits of the vicious, shameless, guilt and scarlet sinners. There is a lack of pleasant self-righteous indictment done in the Lord's vineyard.

Yesterday the Vagabond saw a magazine which nearly quenched his nostalgia for the penny-dreadfuls of yesteryear. It was the Athletic Association "News." At first the issue appeared to be the same Brutes and Brawn confection that has occupied Mr. Ryan's spare moments for years. But on page twenty of the issue which the Vagabond stole from his neighbor's doorsill there was an editorial dripping with the true sweetness and light. To wit:

"This is the one time in four years of undergraduate life for a newcomer to Cambridge to survey the job ahead of him, anticipate the dangers that will becloud his road, and probably for the first time in his life become fully cognizant of his responsibility to himself and to those who have made it possible for him to enter Harvard.

"So many young men come to Cambridge to fail pitifully in that first testing year that it naturally is the constant effort of men who must guide their educational and recreational life to lay emphasis on the pitfalls ahead. They knowingly counsel that carelessness, procrastination, and lack of strength to organize the week's hours lead only to an early termination of association between the undergraduates and his chosen college."

There is no need to go on. This is the making of a crusader. But when the Vagabond had finished it he was reconciled to the fate of "Munsey's" and willing to confess that the moral which once accompanied every lurid fable had slipped his memory. So, conscious of the error of his ways, he abandons his golden dream, his plans for the future of the Harvard Critic, and return to "Fanny Hill," the only safe resort of those in search of literary excitement.