PLEASURES AND PALACES

When the Middlebury Campus views with severe alarm and stoic horror the erection of such a dormitory as the proposed Varsity, now planned for the Mount Auburn regions, it ignores the havoc wrought by time and neglect. Such lavishness may at first appear too Roman for a New England college but experience has shown that the saviour of youthful virility lies in the fact that eventually the "porters" will dwindle into a lone and not over magnificent janitor; that the "maids and bellboys", if such there be, will fade into legend: that the pomp of circumstance will prove disappointingly evanescent.

It would be a wonderful, a marvelous, achievement if the student palaces so dear to the public indignation actually remained palatial for more than their fleeting period of youth and novelty. Harvard has no golden baths, nor did it ever have, but if it had one might safely predict that within a year they would be discovered to be brass. The brief time necessary for delapidation, and worse, to set in college dormitories would be deemed impossible to any besides those who have witnessed it. Elevators originally described as "scaling the building and laden with cargoes of students" slow their flight until it is only with agony that they manage to creep to their destinations. And there are times when they cease motion entirely leaving the inhabitants of these imposing chateaus the privilege either of walking up the dingy, tortuous flights or of remaining below stairs. Therefore such lamentations as those from Middlebury are superfluous--for it is written that every two stories of grandiloquent brick mean two of painful laboring, upward and onward; the flamboyant luxury of "student hotels" usually assume the docile modesty of college owned dormitories.