Bleak days, my fingers stiff in thin cold pigskin gloves, the wind whipping my trouserlegs, numbing my feet so that it hurts to step on them. Such stuff as colds are made on . . .

Nights the one window in the bedroom of my Attic makes clatter enough for twenty, shaking and banging, postponing sleep. Lie and shiver under blankets as proof as gossamer, which absorbs the sheets' unfriendly chill. Gradually warmer inside and colder outside my bed. The tip of the nose stays outside the blankets, stays cold. Like a healthy dog's.

Pushing my nocturnal way through the Yard on the way home from Widener with an armload of books . . .

Listen . . .

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

And fall."

While in Minnesota Swedes hold a gala country dance, big blond square-headed people singing and shouting and stamping and reeling. While in Vermont Ephraim Putney puts down "The Contry Gentleman" and rubs his eyes as he clumps in his loose old Congress gaiters up to bed. While in Florida a huge corps of painters, cleaning-women and janitors go over the Miami-Biltmore, working late to get ready for the coming rush. While overseas the bright young Mr. Eden scratches his head over the second major diplomatic crisis he has had to handle in a year. While Mussolini frowns and Hitler grunts and Stalin snorts into his walrus mustache. The dilemma of Spain is here and has got to be unravelled. What if foreign nations openly intervene? What if foreign nations openly intervene? What can you do to stop them? . . . What stopped Italy . . .? Ha!

Tomorrow morning to hear Bruce Hopper in Government 18, who speaks at 12 o'clock in Harvard 1, on "Security by Sanctions."