A Visit to the Annex.

"Where is the 'Annex'?" is a question whose frequency surprises the well-informed. That the inquirer speaks hesitatingly and adds, 'I ought to know, but I don't,' is a tribute to the unobtrusive life of this rigorous offshoot of Harvard. This ignorance as to the location of the Annex is due of course, to the fact that it has no buildings of its own, but occupies rooms in a small house on a side street. Its surroundings compare unfavorably with those enjoyed by the women students of every other eastern school of its rank. Four rooms in a private house are at the service of the students during the day. None board there, for, happily, the Annex is unencumbered by that "relic of the middle ages," the dormitory system.

The interested stranger will find nothing to attract his attention in the exterior of the house, unless it be the care with which that sanitary law has been observed, which demands that the cold air box to the furnace shall have its mouth at least three feet above the ground, and covered with a wire screen. There are few visitors; perhaps because the students hesitate to take their friends to the rooms, lest they intrude upon the privacy of the family whose home it is. If you enter, you find, on the left, a parlor which is used occasionally as a recitation room, and the rest of the time, as the sitting room of the family. Next to the parlor is a recitation room, and over these are the study and another recitation room A laboratory is fitted up in a house across the way.

That the house is old-fashioned, the window devices bear witness. One must press a spring on the side of the casing to open the lower sashes,- the upper sashes remain as the long-for-gotten carpenter placed them.

The study serves as reading-room, cloak, and lunch room for the fifty-three young women now enjoying the instruction of the Harvard professors. The reading-room of the "Harvard Annex!" Your fancy, unbidden, suggests harmonious colors, inviting easy chairs, a few choice pictures; a happy blending of order and confusion in the details; a wooden mantel, framing a fire-place, and perhaps a bust of Minerva, or, at least, a stuffed owl presiding over it; book-cases filled with all that a student needs to have at hand, leaning in comfortable retirement against the walls; a study. with room enough for fifty people, and not too much for one.

Alas that the reality is so far from embodying your ideal! The twelve hundred books stand boldly out into the room. Simplicity, to speak moderately, reigns everywhere. She appears, in not her most attractive form, in the Franklin stove. She stares blankly at you from her "BOOKS RETURNED," and "BOOKS RECEIVED," which are pasted on the wall over the narrow mantel-piece, and which indicate that there is to be found the connection between the Annex and the Harvard Library. The dimity curtains and patch-covered window-seats cannot be offended at being dubbed "simple." But simplicity abdicates her sway when she approaches the study table, where confusion, I am told, too often reigns. The chairs, also, rebel against being confined to their primitive use, and offer their arms and backs to a heavy burden of Newmarkets, sacques and hats. The interested reader can obtain no adequate idea of the harmonious details I attempt to describe, until he realizes that this room has the ordinary proportions of a chamber. Order is, doubtless, a strong element in the character of the Annex students, but there are overruling circumstances.

No one doubts the wisdom of starting this experiment in the higher education of women, in an unobtrusive and moderate fashion. The success of the plan is its own justification. Now, the time for small beginnings and meagre accommodations is past. The large and growing body of students demands suitable surroundings. The Annex is waiting, like the Bartholdistatue, for the public to realize its need of a substantial foundation.

HAL, '85.