(1)

    (New York Evening Post)

    “DIGNIFIED AND STATELY”

    BEING AN ACCOUNT OF SOME HIGH AND LOW JINKS PRACTICED ABOUT THIS
    TIME ON COLLEGE CLASS DAYS

    BY EVA ELISE VOM BAUR

      Our sorrows are forgotten,
      And our cares are flown away,
      While we go marching through Princeton.

Singing these words, ’round and ’round the campus they marched, drums beating time which no one observed, band clashing with band, in tune with nothing but the dominant note—­the joy of reunion.  A motley lot of men they are—­sailors and traction engineers, Pierrots, soldiers, and even vestal virgins—­for the June Commencement is college carnival time.

Then hundreds upon thousands of men, East, West, North and South, drop their work and their worries, and leaving families and creditors at home, slip away to their respective alma maters, “just to be boys again” for a day and a night or two.

    (2)

    (Harper’s Monthly)

    THE PARTY OF THE THIRD PART

    BY WALTER E. WEYL

    “The quarrel,” opined Sir Lucius O’Trigger, “is a very pretty
    quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain
    it.”

Something like this was once the attitude of the swaggering youth of Britain and Ireland, who quarreled “genteelly” and fought out their bloody duels “in peace and quietness.”  Something like this, also, after the jump of a century, was the attitude of employers and trade-unions all over the world toward industrial disputes.  Words were wasted breath; the time to strike or to lock out your employees was when you were ready and your opponent was not.  If you won, so much the better; if you lost—­at any rate, it was your own business.  Outsiders were not presumed to interfere.  “Faith!” exclaimed Sir Lucius, “that same interruption in affairs of this nature shows very great ill-breeding.”

    (3)

    (McClure’s Magazine)

    RIDING ON BUBBLES

    BY WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT

    “And the Prince sped away with his princess in a magic chariot, the
    wheels of which were four bubbles of air.”

Suppose you had read that in an Andersen or a Grimm fairy tale in the days when you firmly believed that Cinderella went to a ball in a state coach which had once been a pumpkin; you would have accepted the magic chariot and its four bubbles of air without question.

What a pity it is that we have lost the credulity and the wonder of childhood!  We have our automobiles—­over two and a half million of them—­but they have ceased to be magic chariots to us.  And as for their tires, they are mere “shoes” and “tubes”—­anything but the bubbles of air that they are.

    In the whole mechanism of modern transportation there is nothing so
    paradoxical, nothing so daring in conception as these same bubbles
    of air which we call tires.