DEBITS AND DEBUTS

A professor in jack boots bracing himself waist deep against the current of a mountain stream and playing a trout with the gusto and skill of a true sportsman seems a most amazing disruption of the proprieties. Scarcely less startling is the discovery of a member of the faculty deep in a thrilling murder story or a scholar of the classics telling after-dinner stories at which the listener cannot help laughing.

"Eruditi professores" are in large measure what their students make them. These men who teach us must be pedantic pedagogues, they always have been and will continue so. The child's tutor was so inhuman as to call him from his play to books; and the child persisting later finds his professor inhuman. This notion is the school-boy's heritage and is so strong that when an attempt is made to popularize a course, when the professor tries to escape the mould the student fastens upon him, he is criticized as sugar-coating a pill which is preferred bitter, as feebly trying to curry the student's favor.

The college undergraduate at times begins faintly to suspect that while a professor must be a professor in the classroom he may be a man outside. This secret is whispered about like a bit of scandal and heard sceptically by many. One of the few chances the professor gets to "come out" is the occasion of the University teas. Last year it is reported that one Freshman strayed into one of these parties and promptly fied when he discovered the "ogres of the class-room" assembled. Three graduate students from abroad attended and are said to have enjoyed themselves, while the few law students present hung disconsolately about the tea pot. But with the news spreading that Sunday teas in certain famous homes are very pleasant affairs more undergraduates may take advantage of the professors' "coming out" parties at the Union.