The Student Vagabond

The very respectable Limerick about the consternation of the young lady from Back Bay who once threw a Transcript away expresses it exactly. The Boston Evening Transcript is a landmark and an institution, and as such not to be defiled. Its pages, which come from the press smelling more strongly of printers' ink than do those of other newspapers, exhale a reminiscent fragrance. They are an assurance that no traditional detail will over be lightly omitted, from the Alpha of the financial advertisement on page one, to the Omega of the obituaries. It is unthinkable that a silly girl should unreflectingly discard such a very Palladium of her caste, and altogether fitting that she felt the proper remorse after the foolish act was committed.

It is in the details that the editors of the Transcript excel. They immure themselves in a citadel on Newspaper Row which has the flavor of Lamb's India House. There the crisp First National Bank efficiency which characterizes the Boston Herald is not to be found, nor yet the cinematic evidences of Fourth Estateliness which earmark the Boston American as Hearst's. In the crumbly, musty, sooty, comfortable rookery, of the Transcript there is something that reminds the Vagabond at once of Mark Twain, of Horace Greeley, and of Beacon Street. Such a milieu creates an atmosphere most favorable to the production of humorous human-interest stories for every front page; there is an influence extending even from Washington Street to Cambridge which makes the headline "Many Years a Baker in West Roxbury" read like the proper introduction to an obituary; the dry, static condition of their surroundings compels the journalists to write a few inches of padding concerning the weather so that people actually read it. And then, there is H. T. P.

But the saving grace and surpassing virtue of the Transcript is its exquisite sense of humor. The London Times, an historian remarks, publishes documented correspondence on bugs, while the Boston Evening Transcript, as thoughtful and serious-minded as the Times, devotes a page to genealogy. When the Vagabond remembers this he is sure that the poet was too harsh and not at all penetrating when he wrote:

"When evening quickens faintly on the street,

Wakening the appetites of life in some,

And to others bringing the "Boston Evening Transcript,

I say, Cousin Harriet, here is the 'Boston Evening Transcript,

TODAY

9 O'Clock

"Mary Tudor," Professor Merriman, Harvard 6.

10 O'Clock

"Early American Drama," Professor Murdock, Harvard 6.

11 O'Clock

"George Wither," Professor Munn, Sever 11.

MONDAY

9 O'Clock

"Gray and Collins," Professor Munn, Emerson A.

10 O'Clock

"Montaigne's Philosophic Background," Professor Spencer, Sever 11.

"Equations of Heat Conductions," Professor Crawford, Jefferson Physical Laboratory.

11 O'Clock

"Jacksonian Diplomacy," Professor Baxter, Harvard 1.

"Antony and Cleopatra," Professor Matthiessen, Emerson A.

"Influence of Paradise Lost," Professor Rollins, Sever 9.

"William Godwin," Professor Maynadier, Sever 11.