COURTESY AT MEMORIAL.

There are certain requirements of gentlemanly behavior and etiquette which have been taught us by our forefathers at Harvard. It seems imperative at the beginning of each year to recall some of those and to proclaim that there is a tacit understanding that they be adhered to by all those who come here. One of these maxims is this: it is undignified--by some it might be called bad manners --to make unnecessary noises with the crockery, to throw food and make a general disturbance in a hall where a large number of gentlemen are in the habit of congregating to take their meals. This has recently been the situation at Memorial when visitors have appeared in the gallery.

Memorial Hall, having been dedicated to those alumni who gave up their lives in the Civil War, is in a measure hallowed. It is but a token of respect to those heroes for men entering the hall to remove their hats. On the stairs of the visitors' gallery in the dining hall is a placard requesting those unacquainted with the place and its ways to do so. Occasionally visitors fall to acquiesce in this small sign of respect. It is then customary for those below in the dining hall to call the attention of the guests to their failure to comply with what is considered respectful by tapping a tumbler with one of the table accessories. Past experience has proved that it is seldom or never that visitors so reproved fail to amend their fault. At no other time, however, is it necessary to evince any knowledge of the presence of visitors in the gallery. And at no time whatever is such an exhibition of disgracefully bad manners to be tolerated as has lately been paraded in Memorial Hall before the older and saner members present.

To visitors, Memorial Hall is a place of great interest, and it is for this reason that the gallery has been left open and free to the public. The directors of the dining association, however, at a meeting last week, placed in the hands of its executive committee the full power of closing the gallery to all at any time it should see fit. There has been enough of this rowdiness. Let the new members of the College take heed before the authorities are forced to close the hall from the public in shame lest outsiders conclude that the diners are hoodlums instead of gentlemen.