Kansas University Weekly.
129
A Rare October Day.
An Autumn rain falls chilling, drenching down;
The city lights loom wierdly through the gauze
Of mystic twilight, and reveal a rift
Of smoke. whence 'merge the dismal drops, sans pause.
Tonight, the glare lures not the giddy moth
Whose fluttering life the falling leaves describe;
Nor swarms the street with customary throng—
Dull aching world, thou teachest me to gibe!
Earth reeks with dampness; heaven low'rs darkly round;
Unkindly chill augments my homelessness.
Sweet Autumn! wherefore hast thou thus beguiled
Thy devotee? Dark nature claims redress.
Why not? this sullen fit becomes thee ill,
Thou hast presumed to do the initial task
Of Winter but thou apest Spring instead.
Come, prove thy wonted mood,-throw off thy mask.
H. W. S.
A Matter of Fact and an Ethical Question A College Tale.
"All that is left of us, of the the Four Hundred!" she chanted with a mock-tragic air as she started up the steps of the Main Building to meet a blase brunette youth who with his hands in his pockets, was waiting for her by the door.
She was little and blonde, this Alice Gilbey and her hazel eyes were continually dancing. Just now her walking hat was on one side and the wind, which continually hurried across the campus as if it had started late for class, had blown her hair into her eyes. But for all that she was a goodly sight, thought Fred Allison as he shook hands with her in greeting, and smiled down at her with that half-amused, half-tolerant look that all Seniors have for under-class men—and girls.
"It is rather doleful to come back to such a diminished set of friends," "he said, "But is it possible that we are the only ones left of our jolly crowd last year?"
"We are the people," answered Alice straightening her hat, "and not only 'the people', but the only people."
Alice, you will observe, was some-what given to slang. Of course, I am aware that my esteemed readers never under any circumstances descend to such language. But, dear friends, Alice would not be Alice if I did not allow her to use slang, for the fact remains that she did, and she does, and she positively refuses to out grow it. So if you don't like my Alice you can leave her and go read "Sanford and Merton" and the "Rollo books" to your heart's content, and nobody will care a bit though you turn into a page in the Century dictionary. I only hope you will get pounded as often as my dictionary does when it uses words of forty-seven syllables which are beyond the understanding of any human being with veins full of real blood and not Somebody's Extract of Latin for the Petrifying of all Fun.
But while I have been engaged in this furious combat with a straw man, Alice and Fred have moved on into the hall and gone over all the preliminaries of a meeting after vacation.
Alice was a Freshman last year and Fred, a Junior; but the necessities of location had thrown them into contact with Seniors, so that now when they came back from vacation, their clique, "the Four Hundred," they had called themselves, was scattered all over the state, and they found themselves, without particular ties or particular friends anywhere.
"I wonder," thought Alice, as she listened to his account of some summer incident, "if he has found out he is in love with Ethel as we all believed." Then, "I wonder if he really was in love with her. Sometime when I get a chance I'll ask him," she decided. For Alice was given to sudden impertinences and abrupt questions laying bare the real nature of a character or action. Oddly enough, no one ever attacked her right to say what she pleased or even resented it though she touched them ever so sharply. "People accord me all the privileges of an 'enfant terrible,'" she would say, half laughing, half vexed. "I suppose I'm of too little account to matter what I do or know." It was, perhaps, of a certain child-like quality