Each member of the Senior Class prepares a banquet,—­sometimes separately and sometimes in clubs, at an expense varying from fifty to five hundred dollars,—­to which he invites as many friends as he chooses, or as are available.  The banquet is quite as rich, varied, and elegant as you find at ordinary evening parties, and the occasion is a merry and pleasant one.  But it occurred to me that there may be unpleasant things connected with this custom.  In a class of seventy-five, in a country like America, it is quite probable that a certain proportion are ill able to meet the expense which such a custom necessitates.  Some have fought their own way through college.  Some must have been fought through by their parents.  To them I should think this elaborate and considerable outlay must be a very sensible inconvenience.  The mere expense of books and board, tuition and clothing, cannot be met without strict economy and much parental and family sacrifice.  And at the end of it all, when every nerve has been strained, and must be strained harder still before the man can be considered fairly on his feet and able to run his own race in life, comes this new call for entirely uncollegiate disbursements.  Of course it is only a custom.  There is no college by-law, I suppose, which prescribes a valedictory symposium.  Probably it grew up gradually from small ice-cream beginnings to its present formidable proportions; but a custom is as rigid as a chain.  I wondered whether the moral character of the young men was generally strong enough, by the time they were in their fourth collegiate year, to enable them to go counter to the custom, if it involved personal sacrifice at home,—­whether there was generally sufficient courtliness, not to say Christianity, in the class, whether there was sufficient courtesy, chivalry, high-breeding, to make the omission of this party-giving unnoticeable or not unpleasant.  I by no means say that the inability of a portion of the students to entertain their friends sumptuously should prevent those who are able from doing so.  As the world is, some will be rich and some will be poor.  This is a fact which they have to face the moment they go out into the world; and the sooner they grapple with it, and find out its real bearings and worth or worthlessness, the better.  Boys are usually old enough by the time they are graduated to understand and take philosophically such a distinction.  Nor do I admit that poor people have any right to be sore on the subject of their poverty.  The one sensitiveness which I cannot comprehend, with which I have no sympathy, for which I have no pity, and of which I have no tolerance, is sensitiveness about poverty.  I think it is an essentially vulgar feeling.  I cannot conceive how a man who has any exaltation of life, any real elevation of character, any self-respect, can for a moment experience so ignoble a shame.  One may be annoyed at the inconveniences and impatient of the restraints of poverty; but to