The current sentiment had begun when Vag heard the band play "Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind" at the Kirkland House party. He pictured himself in an insular jungle, and it almost seemed that that were real and Harvard the daydream. But he was glad that he was too busy looking forward to the approaching service to let nostalgia get the better of him.

The Vag had learned a lot in three and a half years. He had gotten a general inkling of what the score is, he had learned to see through big people and little people, he had absorbed some hazy ideas about the Intellectual and Social History of Western Civilization and had for better or worse grown up and set. And all the while the learned old ivy and the ageless wrought-iron gates had gotten more important than the skeptical Vagabond had ever thought they would. He appreciated the feelings of the man who wrote, "The saddest tale we have to tell, is when we bid old Yale farewell," only not Yale.

But it wasn't primarily Massachusetts Hall, Plympton Street, Professor Frisky and other permanent fixtures; it was rather the people he had met. The big guy peeping out happily from under a pile of papers and cuddling his vodka, the other one getting yanked out of a Quadrangle tree by a bunch of 'Cliffe-dwellers, irreproachable Paul and lovable Georgie. Not to mention the blond visionary and the albuminous adolescent and, least as well as last, the warm stone from Washington Square. And the things he had done; the beer he had drunk in the Sanctum in honor of his ancestors who had drunk beer there in honor of their ancestors. There, at 4 a.m., he had quietly wondered what he was; there, at 3 a.m., he had stamped out the conga. On the very piece of furniture which now bore him, under the yellow daguerreotype of the bewhiskered 1898 Board, he had written his best editorial, had been introduced to feminine psychology, and had filled out his application to the Army Air Corps.

Vag had no regrets; he would like to have had the four, rapid undergraduate years still ahead of him, but the military adventure attracted him also. The mere change and passing away saddened him in its own right, when he thought of it, but clearing out by midyears left him little time for speculation, and rush favored enthusiasm. It is easier to part with the past when one is intensely interested in the present, he decided.

Life seemed peculiarly precious and beautiful in moments like these, when transitions proved that it was finite, and Vag passed into that mixture of happiness and sadness which can be expressed only by music, and which literature had best omit.

So long, Harvard.