LETTER HOME.  A writer in the American Literary Magazine thus explains and remarks upon the custom of punishing students by sending a letter to their parents:—­“In some institutions, there is what is called the ’letter home,’—­which, however, in justice to professors and tutors in general, we ought to say, is a punishment inflicted upon parents for sending their sons to college, rather than upon delinquent students.  A certain number of absences from matins or vespers, or from recitations, entitles the culprit to a heartrending epistle, addressed, not to himself, but to his anxious father or guardian at home.  The document is always conceived in a spirit of severity, in order to make it likely to take effect.  It is meant to be impressive, less by the heinousness of the offence upon which it is predicated, than by the pregnant terms in which it is couched.  It often creates a misery and anxiety far away from the place wherein it is indited, not because it is understood, but because it is misunderstood and exaggerated by the recipient.  While the student considers it a farcical proceeding, it is a leaf of tragedy to fathers and mothers.  Then the thing is explained.  The offence is sifted.  The father finds out that less than a dozen morning naps are all that is necessary to bring about this stupendous correspondence.  The moral effect of the act of discipline is neutralized, and the parent is perhaps too glad, at finding his anxiety all but groundless, to denounce the puerile, infant-school system, which he has been made to comprehend by so painful a process.”—­Vol.  IV. p. 402.

Avaunt, ye terrific dreams of “failures,” “conditions,” “letters home,” and “admonitions.”—­Yale Lit.  Mag., Vol.  III. p. 407.

The birch twig sprouts into—­letters home and dismissions.—­Ibid., Vol.  XIII. p. 869.

But if they, capricious through long indulgence, did not choose to get up, what then?  Why, absent marks and letters home.—­Yale Banger, Oct. 22, 1847.

He thinks it very hard that the faculty write “letters home.”—­Yale Tomahawk, May, 1852.

  And threats of “Letters home, young man,”
    Now cause us no alarm.
    Presentation Day Song, June 14, 1854.

LIBERTY TREE.  At Harvard College, a tree which formerly stood between Massachusetts and Harvard Halls received, about the year 1760, the name of the Liberty Tree, on an occasion which is mentioned in Hutchinson’s posthumous volume of the History of Massachusetts Bay.  “The spirit of liberty,” says he, “spread where it was not intended.  The Undergraduates of Harvard College had been long used to make excuses for absence from prayers and college exercises; pretending detention at their chambers by their parents, or friends, who come to visit them.  The tutors came into an agreement not to admit such excuses, unless the scholar came to the tutor, before prayers or college exercises, and obtained leave to