THE PRESS

It is some years now since the Roving Reporter received his sheepskin from a New England college, shed a tear or two on the chapel steps and departed either to set the world on fire or discover that its principal ingredient was asbestos.

With the idea of capturing again the thrill that used to come in September this week he visited a few institutions of higher learning and studied modern trends among the undergraduates.

The opening of colleges is just about the same sort of ceremony it was a half score years ago. The same carrying of desks, reading lamps, books and dismantled beds across the campi (he remembered the plural of campus), the same tendency to wear clothing that's a little ahead of the latest word, the some old greetings being shouted from windows and doorways and the same searching for gullible freshmen on whom to practice the same old jokes.

Nor have customs changed in the matter of interior decorations of college rooms. A few empty gin bottles, a stein or two, felt pennants of other colleges (those of rival institutions usually upside down) and books with titles that promise a world of arid fact within.

Most disappointing of all to the Roving Reporter was to hear that same old gag which he first heard as a freshman. Someone asked for the dean. The time-worn Spoonerism offered in reply was "The bean is dizzy."

Mellow-September sunlight, the football squad practicing formations on the field, dingy curtains blowing from the windows of club houses and fraternities and automobiles parked outside the administration buildings.

All, all was familiar--even the first year man with a sheet draped toga-wise about him, undergoing a few preliminary initiation stunts at the hands of a merry group of sophomores.

The Roving Reporter, sunk in reminiscent dreams, had all but decided that colleges, college men and college furniture were as they had always been, when he noticed three jovial students carrying an unfamiliar apparatus along the pathway under the shade of the time-hallowed elm trees.

It was a gaudy contrivance made of bright new sheet tin, wooden mouldings colored bright red and black and a strip of compressed cork. It looked like a modernistic candy counter, except that a long piece of pipe went with it.

"What's that?" he asked, always on the alert for what's new.

"It's a bar," was the reply. "We're carrying it over to our rooms to set it, up."

That's what it was--a bar. The piece of pipe was the foot rest and there were shelves in the thing for the storage of an ample supply of bottles.

"Are you bootleggers?" the reporter asked.

"Nix, feller, we're juniors. This is all the furniture we've got so far. Maybe we'll get some beds before the year's over--if we stay in."

Sadly, and not so reminiscently, the Roving Reporter went to the chapel steps to shed another tear. There were no bars in college 10 years ago. --The Boston Herald.