NOTABILIA. THERE is general satisfaction throughout the University that the game with Princeton will not be played on Thanksgiving. The Faculty heartily share this feeling. While for some seasons past they have looked askance at a Thanksgiving game, they have been unable to cope with the evils resulting from the event as long as the date of the contest remained fixed. This year therefore, the choice of a day following Thanksgiving is most congenial to them; yet it is also a concession to their wishes as well as a necessity to the Yale team. In view of this fact it seems the more reasonable to request that the Thanksgiv ing recess be extended so as to include the Saturday of the struggle. Circumstances have combined to bring the two events close together. Thanksgiving day is appointed by the President of the United States, and the Saturday following is the latest possible date mutually agreeable to the two foot ball managements. According to the present arrangement of the University calendar, men who leave New Haven on Wednesday will be required to return on Friday morning, just a day before the general exodus to New York. This retreat to college life will involve no small expense to every man who goes home for Thanksgiving, and who also expects to witness the Princeton game. The hours moreover occupied in traveling will be by no means few; in many instances more than half a day will be spent on the railway trains. Furthermore the general results of a study period wedged in between two short outings will be far from satisfactory. The attendance at the various exercises will be meagre, owing to the number of those who will bridge the interval from Thursday to Saturday by means of cuts, whether allowed, or taken extra. Even men who attend recitations on Friday will be able to devote but little time to previous study, nor is it pessimistic to believe that their mood and disposition will fail to respond to the best instruction. Concentration under favoring circumstances is difficult to acquire. On the morning following Thanksgiving, and preceding the Princeton game it is unattainable. Even the charms of modern history and the harmony of mathematics fail to allure it at such a crisis. In a word, if Yale men shall be required to respect the limits of the recess as now existing, and attend recitations on the Friday mentioned, the letter of the University law will be carried out; but the enjoyment of well-roasted turkey and spirited foot ball will be unnecessarily curtailed. On the other hand the advantages of an uninterrupted recess for three days are obvious. Men living at some distance from New Haven will be enabled to return home, and enjoy a quiet respite, especially congenial after the sacred holiday, and a fitting preparation for the excitement to follow. That interval has great possibilities. It suggests the recollections of what may have happened the day before-fresh memories of things temporal and spiritual, and cheerful recollections are never sweeter than when coupled with bright anticipations. But the phenomena of Social Science, describing the diet of prehistoric individuals, contrasts too severely with the memories of the toothsome fowl of the previous day, and the terse accounts of the French Revolution disturb one's conjectures about foot ball, and confuse the goal posts with huge guillotines. Without question the proper enjoyment of this promising interval demands that one abandon New Haven, forget the seating arrangement of Osborn Hall, and escape beyond the dominion of the Battell chimes. It is incongruous at such a time to hear the Chapel choir chanting its plaintive wail, accompanied by the organ breathing out another still more dismal. The LIT., therefore, in behalf of the University, respectfully requests the Faculty to dispel all such possibilities of melancholy, by extending the Thanksgiving recess from Thursday until Saturday. Essays in competition for the LIT. Medal should be left at 342 White Hall on or before December 5. Competition is open to all undergraduate subscribers. The essays should be signed with an assumed name and accompanied by an unmarked sealed envelope containing the title of the essay and the full name of the writer. It is essential that essays in competition for the medal be altogether in typewriting inasmuch as the Board of Editors is familiar with the handwriting of many of the probable contestants. PORTFOLIO. SLEEP. Pause, silent-stepping one, restrain thy will. Stay, shield with tender care that timid wing, Lest o'er the form where soon dread Death will cower A. G. K. -Joseph Jefferson says somewhere in his autobiography that good elocutionists are rarely good actors. He cites one startling exception in the case of James Murdoch, whose acting in the antebellum days was considered one of the rarest things of the time, and whose kind old face as he stood at the reader's desk, many of the younger generation remember. Mr. Jefferson chose his exception with as much skill as he established his rule. Murdoch was at once an actor and an elocutionist. In his acting there was that careful rendering of the lines, that delicate respect for the weight and meaning of each word which the most finical speaking master must perforce applaud, and in the readings of his later years there was something more than the mere reader speaking to us. It is not outside the recollection of many a young admirer of Richard Mansfield and his school that Murdoch stepped for the last time upon the stage and scored the greatest success of his life., Booth was making a triumphal tour through Europe in 1883. He was at the acme of his powers and was the beau ideal of the American stage. The managers of the Cincinnati dramatic festival had determined to give a grand production of Hamlet, but alas, Hamlet was in Germany. What was to be done? In a lucky moment they hit upon Murdoch, and he was prevailed upon to accept. He was far advanced in years and had stepped quietly off the stage long before, but he felt that the festival was above all a personal honor and he played in his very best mood. Barrett was cast for Horatio and McCullough the Ghost, and yet this worn out actor of another generation was king of them all. Wig Cosmetics, disguises of all kinds could not make a youth of him as he stood in the opening act, but the minute he began speaking, "A little more than kin and less than kind," he was the same Hamlet who had charmed the public in bygone years. True, his voice was "cracked within the ring," but the old fire remained and the well remembered accent and modulation. Old play goers of the days of the elder Booth flocked to hear, and sentiment sighed again after its long silence and the rosy days "when we were young" came streaming back into the memory. It must have been a sad thing for old lovers of the drama to hear him say that last noble line of the noblest of all tragedies "The rest is silence." We have a personal affection for actors, deeper perhaps than for any other band of artists, and that inevitable "last-appearance," whether it be the dying gasp of Salvini's Othello, or Patti's swan song, or the last little feminine kick of Lotta's "golden slipper" touches us very keenly. C. W. W. -The little mackerel steamer puffs out of the harbor, past the fleet of dories which strain impatiently at their moorings as the ebb tide tries to lure them away, and beyond the wandering gulls, whose fretful cries blend with the note of the lonely bell-buoy and the drowsy ebb-tide surf in a weird song of melancholy. Far out at sea appears a rippling blackness— as if a sudden squall had struck the water-which shows a school of closely-crowded fish moving directly toward us. The crew scramble into the dories and row in opposite directions, their course marked by a semicircle of bobbing corks. In a moment the circle is completed, the pursing-lines beneath the net are drawn, and the fish are enclosed in a huge floating basket. As the dripping net is slowly pulled into the boats, the water begins to sparkle, then flash with the gleam of desperate fish, |