NOTABILIA.

THE election of the Board of Editors from the Junior Class will take place in 194 Old Chapel on the evening of Monday, the nineteenth of February at seven o'clock. It is not amiss to remind the members of the Junior Class that these elections are made by a strictly class vote, and that careful consideration of the qualifications and work of each man is not only just but necessary. The Board of Editors in office has the right to accept and approve or to reject the Board elected, if such elections are distinctly unworthy. But this veto power is a distasteful thing, and there is small chance of occasion for its use, if the Junior Class feels in this matter the interest which it demands.

The Board of Editors announces the elections from the Senior Class to Chi Delta Theta of Thomas Frederick Davies of Detroit; Ralph Reed Lounsbury of Hartford, Warwick James Price of Cleveland and Richard H. Worthington of Baltimore.

The LIT. medal has been awarded to Lindsay Denison of the Junior Class of Washington, for his essay "Ophelia and the Sons of Germania" which appears in this issue. Honorable mention is made of Chauncey Wetmore Wells of the Sophomore Class of Middletown, for his essay, "Hawthorne, The Unfinished Romances," and of Julian Ingersoll Chamberlain of the Junior Class of New York, for his essay "Emerson as a Literary and Spiritual Force." The competition was unusually good, both in the number and quality of essays submitted. The thanks of the Board are offered to Professor Beers and Professor Reynolds who kindly consented to act on the Committee which read the essays.

PORTFOLIO.

-A ruined Abbey, the stone walls covered with ivy, is in the foreground, while on all sides beyond is the great park of Ashleigh Elms. The ancient buildings, the peaceful rural scenery, the people themselves and the very sport for which they have come together, all form a scene that is British to the core, a scene that represents many of the most delightful elements of life in England. It is about eleven in the morning, and the Pytchley Hunt is having its annual meet at the manor house of Ashleigh. The hounds are in the center of the court, surrounded by the master and whips, the farmers of the neighborhood, innumerable red-coats and visitors, whom the picturesqueness of the place and the reputation of the neighboring coverts have brought out in holiday numbers. The grooms are busy getting their masters' hunters in trim condition, while noblemen and tenants alike are discussing the prospects of a good run with that delightful eagerness peculiar to true sportsmen.

When all is ready the master gives the signal to start, and with the huntsmen and hounds leads the way down the great avenue of Elms to draw at the Ashleigh woods. They are entered, the barking of forty hounds is heard; the horses become spirited, the riders excited, and within a few minutes the whole hunt is beyond the estate eagerly pursuing poor reynard.

A. P. S. JR.

-There is no proverb whose wisdom we disregard oftener than the one which declares our best things lie closest round our feet. We overlook what nature has laid at our doors, especially when we are searching for that attendant sprite of æstheticism, the picturesque. We have come to believe that it can be found nowhere save in an atmosphere of Old World traditions or in those parts where man has not yet spoiled God's own handiwork. And so we buy our tickets for the Italian Lakes or the Yosemite, forgetting to look at and admire what is near by, sometimes in our very midst. But the very fact that we are so intimate with the things about us closes our eyes to their beauties; that which a stranger might see and remark upon at first glance, we pass over as commonplace and stale. It is only by accident that we sometimes are awakened from our indifference; we rarely, if ever, consciously go in search of the picturesque, but now and then some chance bit of coloring, some quaint grouping of people in the markets, or a bit of grotesque building, make us believe that our prosaic, workaday cities have picturesque possibilities after all, even in the midst of brick blocks and within sound of the engine whistle.

Go down to the big drawbridge, at the close of one of these winter afternoons, and your faith in the local picturesque will be materially strengthened. Far below you, out toward the lonely tower of the light, three or four coasters are lying icebound, the spars and standing rigging clearly outlined against the grayness of the sky. The crowded city tenements are blended in a bluish haze, which softens their harsh squareness into a shapeless mass of neutral color. A yellow radiance which bursts through the rents in the cloud curtain gilds a chimney top or church spire here and there, -the only lights against the somber background. The ice stretches away in a gray infinity out to sea, crackling and heaving above the restless tide in a series of muffled reports which echo sharply under the bridge, while the crashing fall of the great icicles which a month's frosts and thaws have built up, only to end in ruin, adds not a little to the salvos of nature's mimic artillery beneath us. There is not a breath of air; the smoke from the hazy city's chimneys pours in straight columns.

Down on the ice, centering the whole composition, never heeding the menacing cracks all about them, a few men stand armed with long poles, eagerly thrusting through into the soft mud below, searching out the eels who had hoped to pass a comfortable winter free from annoyance by rapacious anglers. They are an interesting group, these fishermen, as they stand in alert attitudes, nervously working their long spears, now clustering about some soul whose patience has been rewarded, always in motion. Scraps of song come drifting up through the still air. Now the darkness comes on, and the men's forms become shadowy; they move about like gray phantoms over the ice, noiselessly. Then they drift away into the twilight, until all have disappeared. The lights begin to twinkle along the shore, and the clangor of the bells sounds a curfew, telling us that the day's work is over.

E. G. T.

-During all the storms of religious chaos which from time to time threatened to overwhelm Europe with impurity and superstition, the Christian faith was preserved untouched in a small isle on the northwest coast of Scotland. A band of exiled monks from Ireland had landed there years before, erected a monastery and called the place Iona, the "blessed Isle." And like the last glow of the sunset, which always seem to linger lovingly about what is now a grand old ruin, so the light of Christianity remained undimmed there for many centuries. Symbolic of this ancient and unalterable record of piety, a large stone cross stands on an eminence overlooking the sea and the neighboring bays and islands, keeping guard as it were against the desecration of memories that have passed away to oblivion. Its delicate carving is still visible, and its design is of the most antiquated order known. In fact McLean's cross is said to be the oldest Christian monument in Great Britain, and it certainly has an appearance of dignity and age that accords well with this claim. The bleak, forbidding coast of Mull with its white lines of foaming breakers is quite plain from the knoll on which the cross stands, and nowhere else on the island does the wild, desolate scenery that is the very charm of that region become so impressive. Far to the south and west stretches the wide, mysterious sea, and through a depression in the hills of the Ross of Mull, the blue outlines of Jura's mountains can be distinguished lying to the eastward. As a rule the sky is overcast and of a peculiarly leaden hue, yet on a clear, sunny day the sparkling water seems to dance in the light, the salt breezes play softly around the great stone cross, and weird, uncouth shadows fall on the headlands and precipitous shores of this sacred isle.

Many are the scenes which this cross has beheld in the past ages; as when the bell was calling the priest to vespers in the quiet of the evening, or when they formed in solemn procession to meet the boats that were slowly coming down the sound bearing a dead chieftain. Then come the scenes of carnage that were enacted when the "Raven of the North," sweeping down upon the little isle, sacrificed the abbott and all his monks to Odin.

But with undismayed courage more monks came over, and although many fell victims to the Norse pirates, and had their

buildings sacked and burnt, nevertheless they persevered, and the name of Iona soon became famous as a sanctuary, and the home of an undefiled religion. Moreover, in the Reilag Oran, or burial place of St. Oran, there lie forty Scottish kings, two Norwegian and two Irish kings, and a red unpolished stone covers the grave of an unknown king of France, who had found his last resting place in this distant, sea-girt isle, far from the blue Mediterranean and the broad vineyards of his native land. However, they have all long since been forgotten, as well as the monks of St. Columba and their good deeds, but the massive stone cross, its intricate tracery half covered with lichens, still maintains its commanding position, a silent but significant witness.

Ε. Η.

In nothing has literature had a greater influence than in guiding superstition. It has played the double part of diffusing throughout the race each particular fallacy and then of remaining as a record of the credulity of its time. As our literature has come down to us from two widely separated origins-from Rome and from the Sagas of the Saxons-we can trace through all its history the curious intermingling of two very different ideas. The Spirits of the Dead who appeared to our forefathers of the North were always robed in white, those who visited the dreams and inhabited the Nether world of the Southern races were as invariably the color of a shadow. One was a Ghost, the other a Shade.

Of the two, the Shade is to literature by far the greater debtor. As his birth place was in Greece and Italy, he has come to us through the classics. In the Middle Ages he belonged peculiarly to those who could read Latin. But the Ghost was the friend of the people, and stories of his white and awful form were told round every fire-side. So the two became confused. No where is the inextricable tangle of the two ideas better illustrated than in Shakspeare. Perhaps the extent of Hamlet's erudition might be proved by showing how much the spirit of his father resembled the classic "Shade of Anchises." The apparation was "in the same figure like the king that's dead," except that its shadowy form was "as the air invulnerable." But when Horatio comments on its appearance he commits the anachronism of placing "the sheeted dead

in the streets of Rome."