A TALK WITH A CAMBRIDGE POLICEMAN.

There is an idea prevailing in the breast of many men who are fond of "fun" of a more boisterous kind, that a Cambridge policeman is a pitiless avenger of students' escapades, whose only desire is to lie around corners and get students into trouble. If such persons would call upon the veteran policeman whom we found in the station the other day when we were investigating the "small-pox scare," all of his fears of this monster would be dispelled, and he would find him a pleasant, rugged-faced man, glad to talk on subjects best suited for a student's entertainment. After we had found that the report concerning the case of small-pox in college was all a humbug, we asked the officer on duty at the station in what respects the Harvard student of today differed from the student of years ago. "Well," he said, taking a puff at his cigar, "the students are a different lot altogether from what they used to be. There used to be a lot of those hot-blooded Southern fellows in college - fellows that had all the money they wanted, and who dared to do anything. They used to do things that were ingenious - things that required brain-work to invent; and lots of daring to carry out. Once they blew out the whole side of University. Of course any one could have thought of that, but it required lots of nerve to do it, and do it in such a way as to escape detection. At another time they were going to have a big time here putting up the flag-pole. They were going to put up the pole on the morning of the Fourth of July, and left it lying on the ground the night of the third. A party of students went there that night, and painted the whole length of it with green paint. They put an inscription on it that wasn't very complimentary to the city of Cambridge, and signed the venerable old president's name to it. Of course that sort of spoiled the next day's celebration. It took two or three coats of white paint to get off the green. After the pole was up, we went out one morning and found a washbasin on top of it. How any one could have got it there nobody knew. All the men in Cambridge went out and fired at it with their revolvers, but it was three or four hours before any one hit it. Then again they put a large tin cap on the top of the soldiers' monument on the common. It took all of the hook and ladder companies and a windy speech of the mayor's to get it off. There used to to be some knockers in college then. Two or three of them would tackle a whole crowd, and fight till they cleaned them out, or got laid out themselves. Once a few of them cleaned out a whole car-load of men and made the driver of the car turn around and go back to Cambridge on the same track he went in on. Stirring times then. We don't have any of them now. The fellows have toned down of late years. We don't have anything to do now except catch a freshman now and then for hooking a barber's sign, or something of that sort. Then they are so babyish about it there ain't any fun in it. They try to get out of it in some way or other. I tell you when the fellows got caught in anything years ago, they died game every time. They didn't say that it wasn't all right for us to catch them. They found out what the fine was, and antied up like men without any fooling. Some fun for us to catch a man like that. There isn't any sense in the little tricks that they do now-a-days, hooking a barber's sign now and then, and then acting as if they were scared to death over it. Now, the idea of blowing up the beech tree! Why any fool could do that. Besides, that is mean, for it could never be replaced. Now, if they should blow up a college building money would fix that all right, but the idea of harming a tree! I'd like to catch them at it once." At this point our policeman host was obliged to leave and go out on his beat. Thanking him for his interesting talk, and for his kind invitation to "call again and hear more," we left, thinking to ourselves that a Cambridge policeman, after all, was not such a bad kind of a person as some think.