Μ

MY

Y DEAR BOB, You are about to leave Cambridge, and are, I have no doubt, by this time in the midst of your annual examinations on your year's idleness. Knowing that if you get your degree it will serve you only as a lever with which to pry out of me the necessary funds for a year or two in Europe, I cannot say that I feel any desire that you should get one. Your mother would, I have no doubt, be glad to have you go abroad; but as it will only give you a few more expensive tastes, and make you still more unable to gratify them, I think it as well for you to stay at home.

As for your bills, make me out a list of them, a first edition, as no spendthrift ever made a wholly clean breast. I shall expect the next edition in the fall. When you have been in the office of the "File and Screw Company" for three months, you will learn that your labor has a market value in the world

of about a hundred dollars a year, and you will fully appreciate the value of the money which I shall divert from your allowance to satisfy Messrs. Ober, Pike,

etc.

As for your taking a profession, I shall hear of nothing of the kind. Is it likely that a man who has let his brain run to seed for four years, who likes his breakfast in bed, and has a fondness for "society" and pleasure generally, can compete with such hardheaded and well-trained men as Staggers and Grinder of your class, for instance? I hope your Class Day will be a successful one, though I expect to pay all your club bills under the guise of expenses for your "spread," class photographs, and subscriptions. I cannot get on myself, but shall be at Commencement, where my class will have one of their quiet reunions, and I shall stay to the Phi Beta Kappa dinner. I am your affectionate father, ROBERT Bender.

957 FIFTH AVE., N. Y., June 10, 1879.

From Robert Bender, Sen., Esq., to James Mount Vernon, Esq.

DEAR JIM, I shall be on to our dinner, old fellow, and am looking forward to having a jolly time with you all. Young Bob, my son, is to graduate this year. The boy is a chip of the old block, but is much quieter, though about as lazy, as I was. I have just despatched him a severe parental note, which will wake him up a little. The young rascal has had the whip-hand of me since he discovered that I graduated suddenly at the end of Sophomore year, and ever since you told him the old story of our blowing up the tutors in Hollis and leaping the toll-gate in the gig. You always were a "sieve," especially after the second bottle, but you might at least have kept dark about my last Med. Fac. scrape. Bob is n't in that,

66

I think; he writes about the Art Club, the "O. K.," literary etc., and about a certain " club, which costs a pretty penny, but he can't humbug me. I hope you have n't become so starched up by your confounded Puritan city that you have forgotten how to sing the "Good Old Colony Days,” and that you will throw off the bank president and become old Jim again on the 25th. I am yours, ROBERT BEnder.

A

THE CLASS POET.

BOUT this time there is one man in almost every college in the land who begins to wish he had not been born so talented, the Class Day Poet. Like his fellows, he has to bear the weight of examinations, issue his spread invitations, and attend to the thousand-and-one trifling matters which fall to the lot of the aspirant for a sheepskin. But when, in addition to these, there is superimposed the responsibility of concocting and delivering the Class Day Poem, life does indeed seem to be a burden, and to contain cares and trials of which he has hitherto lived in happy ignorance. It will be a proud and happy day, undoubtedly, and all the family and a large delegation of friends are coming to share in his triumph; she is coming, too, and in that one fact he finds an incentive to work, and goes rhyme-hunting with renewed vigor. But it is not wholly rhyme-hunting, unfortunately. This work in hand is no child's play, and very different from writing for the College paper, a field in which he is very much at home, and where he earned the reputation of a "literary man," which has brought him to his present exalted position. His work is to

write a poem, - not a few verses to be rattled off in an hour, or to be composed in his note-book in Chemistry lecture for the University Blunderbuss. This must be a work of such merit as to reflect credit upon himself as author and upon his Class for discrimination in their choice. And as Lampy has malice towards none and charity for all, he gives a few hints on the subject for the benefit of his pers- no, aspiring friends.

The main difficulty is the metaphor for the groundwork of the poem. And it is to this Lampy will confine his remarks. The gratulatory verses, treating of the victories of the Class on field and river, and various college incidents, offer no particular obstacle, and may be tossed in à la Blunderbuss.

worn.

The ship metaphor is a good one, but somewhat The average poet is very prone to liken his class to a ship sailing for four short years on the academic mill-pond, and about to be launched on the tempestuous sea of life. The garland simile is a little less hackneyed, - to represent the Class as a beautiful chaplet of flowers lying in the sunshine of Alma Mater, its varied component parts forming a fragrant and perfect whole. These and others of a like stamp are undeniably good, but the public craves novelty, something to suit the times. For example:

Four festive fleeting years are flown

Since, coming smiling to the scratch, We started, Classmates, you and I, Upon our four years' walking match.

This is a capital theme, and offers a vast field for ingenuity. The laps of a walking track and the lapse of time afford an opportunity for subtle jests. The impediment to the feet of the athletes offered by Greek roots and log-arithms might be effectively handled, and a flock of sheep could be introduced at the finish eagerly waiting to give up their hides to be converted into A. B.'s, as the prizes of the race.

Or the subject might be treated gastronomically, a happy thought being borrowed from the civilizing sausage, thus:

With such a beginning it would be easy to carry out the idea, and to follow the dogs and boys through their respective mills, pointing a moral here and adorning a tale (tail there's a nugget!) there, until the Class is hung up before its friends on Class Day in the form of a link of toothsome sausages.

The patriotic rocket is not a bad subject, the brilliancy of its bursting being typical of the effect the Class will have upon the world when it shall have burst its collegiate bonds and elicit the "O-o-oh!" of the two nations. But the rocket inevitably comes down a stick. On the whole, we hedge on the rocket question.

But we have given a sufficiency of hints. We expect to reap the reward about the last of June in the shape of a crop of Class Day poems decidedly above the average in point of excellence.

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