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You complain, Helen, that I sent away the maid on your corridor in Merion who was
so nice and obliging as to keep all your dishes washed. Indeed, I am very much afraid
that nice maid was washing your dishes when she should have been doing something more
important, Your little rhyming attempt was pretty and girlish, but your phrase ‘‘ala-
baster brow’’ does not seem quite new, does it?

Save up all your tangles, dear girls, for me to straighten out in the next number, and
remember your advisor is always ready to help you in every problem of Freshman life.

MARIAM COFFIN.

Rush Night

“Ditches, you darned old ditches,’’—perhaps the burden of that song (later to be
sung with so much feeling) evolved itself in the author’s brain on rush night—why not ?—
when the entire class fell at least five times into those slippery, muddy, rainy, old ditches.
The wonder of it is that we ever crawled out again in sufficient numbers to sing “you
darned”’ in the hereafter. We were mad, so we rushed well, once, shivering in the rain
as we waited on those athletic steps, we were nearly reduced to tears by Catharine’s
saying plaintively, ‘‘O Sue, if Miss Spence could only see us now!’’—but then we got mad
again and our spirit returned. So, when the command came (from our bedraggled Juniors)
to march, we were off through the rain and the blackness, safely and surely crossing a
perilous bridge, and bursting into the glare and light of Radnor with its mob of jeering
girls. What a noise we made! and what a racket they made! and the greater grew the
excitement, the harder we gripped each other, and yelled into the faces of our betters,
“But 1906 is the best by far.”’

Radnor, Merion, Denbigh, Pembroke—how did we ever get through them—our course
was the course of a comet, we thought (and said so later). All the slurs cast in our direction
by the eager Sophs, all the songs flung at us, all the too warm or too cool receptions were as
nothing to us. When lights were turned out and spooks and ghosts blocked the way, we
bolted undaunted through their midst; when innumerable ‘‘temporary chairmen’’ were
found seated in our path, we ignored them and strode on, failing to see that the joke was
on us; when, finally, maidens stood on either side with their hair down in front and false
faces on their backs, we simply forgot to look at them, we were absorbed in ourselves.
We were just one long segmented snaky embodiment of a song, we lived but to scream and
ever scream, ‘‘There’s nineteen five and three and four’’—

ETHEL STRATTON BULLOCK.

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