"Fire, Fire! Catastrophe!" The clang of a muffled bell fang out through the night. Vag, wandering down Holyoke Street, stopped short in his tracks. Screams of women and shouts of men could be heard coming from the innermost recesses of the Big Tree Swimming Pool. A man of action, Vag sprang to the rescue, dashed down a side alley, and burst through a small door at the rear of the Big Tree. Acrid smoke filled his nostrils. But undaunted, he staggered on through a dark corridor shouting, "Everybody keep calm. Walk, don't run, to the nearest exit!"

Suddenly he lurched into a well-lighted room just as someone announced, "His Majesty, Louis XVII of France!" But Vag was not to be disconcerted by idle flattery. There was work to be done! "Where's the fire?" he asked breathlessly.

"Fire?" A hundred eyes stared down at him, through the smoke of innumerable cigarettes. "What fire?"

Vag hesitated, a little taken aback. The place where he found himself was, to say the least, surrealistic. In front of him was the crude semblance of an early nineteenth century drawing room with men and women strewn about in various histrionic positions. A little man with flowing red hair was wandering about among them, muttering to himself and glaring at the Vag. Yet when he looked behind him, the Vag knew indubitably that he was at the bottom of a swimming pool, sans water, and above him were tier upon tier of weird looking people, perched on diving boards and the tiled edge of the pool, all tangled up with lights, wires, victrolas, and bells.

"But, but I thought there was a fire!" Vag stammered.

The little man with the red hair strode up to him and said, "This, my good man, is a rehearsal of the Harvard Dramatic Club! If you want to see our production, come next Wednesday night,--but not now!"

And as the disconsolate Vag was ushered out, someone in the nineteenth century drawing room said, "She had a beautiful neck, like a swan"