"HAVE YOUR HEARD THIS ONE?"

Harvard men have the reputation of being silent. Silent that is, when they are in a group not composed of their own friends or classmates; and this same silence has often been attributed to snobbishness or worse. But as a matter of fact, when a man does not talk, it is usually because of one of three things; he is bored, he cannot express himself or he has noting interesting to say.

None of these conditions is inevitable. To be bored--or to assume boredom--is merely putting an insult upon your own intelligence in picking your company; the other two are merely the result of inexcusable mental laziness.

"Talking", said Holmes, "is one of the fine arts--the noblest, the most important, and the most difficult"; and those who have read his Breakfast Table chats will agree with him. Yet in present times the breakfast table has been supplanted by the quick lunch system with its ready-to-serve conversation, and the coffee-houses of the seventeenth aned eighteenth centuries have given way to gatherings where "the one about the traveling salesman" or the too-familiar cry. "Here you heard this one?" are the order of the day. No more is needed in order to be a "wit" than a superficial line of questionable repartee or the ability to first casually.

In such an event, perhaps the stigma of being silent is not so great, after all. Certainly there is not much of a fine art in doing what the veriest hod-carrier could do. Yet sometimes, while reading Addison, or Lamb, or Carlyle or Coleridge--or Holmes, there comes the wish that all this knowledge and mental stimulation that is being showered upon Cambridge with virtually every lecture hour could be used with enjoyable results outside of class-rooms and the covers of blue-books. Then really could he who prices himself on his "cleverness" stand or fall on solid merit; and he who is by nature reserved and silent find some few means with which to share his thoughts with appreciative friends.