This is a very melancholy occasion. The Campus wears an air of desolation. The robins on the green have suspended their animation and are belatedly scurrying from the deluge. Mournful ejaculations of "well-a-day" and "alack" ascend from the midnight cloister. Even the "A" men are trembling in their boots. It is all rather sad.

The proctors have exhumed their traditional cerecloth, and swathed in mortuary folds, are softly pacing the unburied ranks in the Gymnasium. The mysterious tutelary spirit (gaunt spectre of the undergraduate) has emerged from his hibernation and once more tolls the bell and once more makes unintelligible unanimity all the sparrows of the city have abandoned the open spaces and are now chirping and wrangling in their peculiar manner over the gloomy aisles. It is significant that none of the sparrows has ever been found in the Gymnasium except during the periods of inquisition. They are doubtless imported for the occasion by the sprightly overseer to tantalize the troubled multitude with a bright vision of liberty. It is all rather sad.

The Columbia undergraduate is strongly perturbed. A cup of coffee in one hand and a library in his wake, he trundles dismally along the appointed orbit. And as he passes, the foul Eumenides tweak his dank locks. When he falls by the wayside they smear his gaunt frame with thick and amylaceous sepulchral ointments, gleefully telling his ribs as they ply their flendish task. Let us shudder and shamble onwards.

At such an hour the curious architecture of University Hall assumes a terrible significance; its resemblance to a ferry-boat has now a gruesome appropriateness. We now know that it was intended to symbolize the barge of Charon carrying its freight from shore to shore. We are too dejected even to mutter maledictions on the head of the architect possessed of this ghastly sense of humor. It is all rather sad.

We will go forth and buy us a derby and a cane that we too, may look like an undertaker. The dregs await us. Pathetic elegies persist in recurring to us.

He sobbed and he signed and a gurgle he gave,

Then he threw himself into the billowy wave,

And an echo arose from the suicide's grave--

'Oh willow, titwillow, titwillow.' It is all rather sad. --Columbia Spectator.