MUEZZIN

A faint shudder ran through the ranks of the unenlightened when the Reading Period would be repeated in the high and far off times when Seniors would be wearing gowns and Yard concerts were the vogue for Brattle Street. But a whisper followed and as it ran, smoothed the ruffled brow and calmed the palpitating hand. For the Reading Period would come in May, and in May Radcliffe would come again to Harvard. All was well; though reading assignment and thesis pluck at the heart of the courageous, yet even when the trial was hottest they would gain sweet respite. The Brattle Hall stage would blossom with lovely faces and form, and the Dramatic Club would ward off disaster even at that faltering midpoint of the Reading Period.

How far-reaching, then, may be the effects of the absence of Radcliffe undergraduates from the announced case of "Hassan" is all too easily imaginable. Brattle Hall, owning no Ethiopian heaven but merely a prim balcony, had been pictured in the happy mind of the Harvard undergraduate as being itself for one exotic night a Mohammedan heaven, with all joys of the East offered for the vicarious happiness of the onlooker. The refreshing lotus was poised a moment at the mouth f the weary student, only to be snatched away even as his lips parted. For in the Cambridge Koran it is written; Basketball bloomers may come to Agassiz Hall, but never Oriental bloomers.

Life will go on; the longer Reading Period may even be a success. Only, perhaps, there will be heard on that opening night in mid-May one mighty tribute to the first hiatus in the old union on the stage of Harvard and Radcliffe; a single great welling sob, acknowledging the Harvard heaven houriless.