Obviously it's in order to welcome the several hundred new members to our fair and windy community. With these words of welcome a few admonitions and suggestions are called for. You new men will find Boston a very peculiar place. If you're the conservative or stay-at-home type, you might even call Boston "quaint." Boston is a place where civilization, faintly evident during the daylight hours, flares up for the few short twilight hours, and disappears promptly at 2400, Saturday night in particular.

Boston is impressed with its culture, and you'd best be considerate of this fact. Symphony Hall is the hub of this culture, but there is only one difficulty. The street car that takes you to Symphony Hall stops first at the Statler and then at the Copley Plaza. If you are strong-willed enough to cling to your finer intentions, you will perhaps be on the way toward absorbing some of this culture of which Bostonians are so proud.

There are also many museums in Boston and its environs; there is no better way to spend Sunday than by rendering a minute inspection of these intellectual shrines. After a week of cutting classes and playing bridge your mind will be screaming for self-improvement, for learning. This can be accomplished readily from 1200 Saturday to 1945 Sunday. The most notable of these cathedrals of the mind are the Statler and the Copley Plaza.

You entering student officers are, in a qualified sense, Harvard men. This entails several responsibilities. No longer will you take the subway or tube over the Charles River to Park Street. As a Harvard man--in a qualified sense--you take the "cah over the Chahles to Pahk." As a pro tem and pseudo Crimson student you may move only in strict channels so far as relations with women are concerned. Those channels are Radcliffe, Pine Manor, and Wellesley. You may date a Radcliffe girl, but the chances are pretty good that she'll outrank you; also her disbursing grades will be higher than yours. You may date a Pine Manor or Wellesley girl, but she has to catch a train at 2345; therefore you lose the last and most important fifteen minutes before the curfew rings. In the latter case you will catch the next-to-last subway back to Harvard Square, and that is contrary to the rules of the game.

You should be tolerant when conversing with Bostonians, particularly if you hail from the Great Plains or beyond. If you find a native who has been west of Pittsburg, you will have to explain carefully that Los Angeles is a few hundred miles the other side of Chicago and that Utah and Idaho and Nevada are not allied nations. You will have to demonstrate patiently that illiteracy is not on the increase in your home state, that your college has a library and a few qualified professors, that the Pony Express is not the only available means of communication.

You will find Boston a city of contrasts. In the very same week that a new novel is banned and thirteen men are arrested for "gaming on the Lord's day," you will find Errol Flynn's successor getting a big play in the newspapers and the Tassel Queen still reigning supreme in the Hub.

Don't get us wrong, though; we like Boston.

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More than half of the students in the new class entering today are officers; the rest will be V-12 midshipmen.

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New collar insignia, being designed by Mr. Bob Davis of the Coop for midshipmen in the senior class, will be ready for sale early in April. The new device will be a gold oak leaf superimposed on an anchor.