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which he describes so beautifully, in a starving condition, a negro woman on the frontiers served up to him a dish of boiled mutton and turnips, with an apology for the poorness of the fare; and the book closes with the author's exclamation : "Boiled mutton and turnips! Head of Apicius! What a banquet!" So true is the old proverb we learned in our Latin Prose, Fames condimentum optimum.

We degenerate moderns can never achieve anything in the gastronomic line equal to what was done by the ancients. Ancient history bristles with facts relative to the profusion of Roman tables, and the voracity of Roman eaters. We read of Lucullus's three hundred dining-rooms, and the Apollo room, wherein each banquet cost the revenue of a whole province; of six hundred ostrich heads, each prepared in a different way for a dinner given by young Heliogabalus; of two and twenty courses counted at a dinner of the same Emperor; of couriers appointed by Trajan, to bring him on the banks of the Euphrates fresh oysters from Lake Lucrinus; of the Emperor Antoninus who died from eating too much cheese; of Claudius Esopus, the actor, who had taught Cicero the art of declamation, and gave six hundred pounds for a bird which had learned to sing, speak, and think, that he might make a fricasee of it. Darius, it will be remembered, sometimes assembled at one of his dinners fifteen thousand guests, and spent a million of dollars on a banquet. When the Emperor Otho dined with his brother, seven thousand sorts of birds, and two thousand sorts of fishes, were served up. Cleopatra, when supping with Mark Antony, was so delighted with a bird prepared in a particular way, that she left nothing but the bones; and the Roman general was so gratified with the cook, that he sent for him and made him a present of a whole city. We might record many more trencher facts on classical authority, but they rather tend to shake our faith in our old friends, and to make us inclined to accuse them of drawing the long bow!

The vegetarians have not altogether died out, though the Grahamites are nearly defunct. Perhaps one reason that vegetarians are so quiet is, that carrots and cabbages have a sedative influence, and do not afford stimulus enough to enable their consumers to make any very striking demonstrations. However, we make this suggestion with great diffidence, for in a notice of the meeting of a highly respectable vegetarian society, in New York, we observed that a lady speaker was very severe on cabbages, on account of their "latent intoxicating properties." The idea is terrific! Think of a gentleman

being excited and noisy on cabbage, and carried to bed, and a prospective headache, after his third plate of greens! Another speaker at the above assembly went into rhapsodies over the intimate connection between "godliness and garden-sauce." We were always under the impression that Nebuchadnezzar was turned out to grass on account of his un-godliness. But this is an age of discovery.

A BIT OF COLLEGE ROMANCE.

FEW of our fellow-students who regard College as a world in itself, self-acting and governing, containing (during the four years passed within its walls) all the elements of our happiness, furnishing us with all the tender memories and associations which cling around it when looked back upon in after life, and who, above all, laugh over or sneer at the idea of "Woman in College,” are at all aware of the influence which this same woman exerts among us, or of the extent of our indebtedness to her for our enjoyment here and our sweet recollections hereafter.

The Freshman, as he meditates for the first time over a fire which he can call his own, and glances with pleasure about a room which he rented for himself and furnished to suit his own taste, succeeds awhile no doubt in drowning the thought of woman mother and sweetheart alike—in the first intoxicating sensations of manhood and independence.

College seems to him a world of men, a place for the cultivation of everything which is manly, and the unlearning of everything of a womanly nature. He determines to acquire a sternness of character, and to stifle all susceptibility by studied indifference. He decides, perhaps, that any sensitiveness or tenderness, which was natural to him before he entered college, is inconsistent with the dignity of his new situation, and unbecoming his manhood. But when, of a sudden, his reverie is disturbed by the crashing of glass, and the fire over which he was dreaming is partially or wholly extinguished by a jet of water from an unseen source, then, in his awakening from the imaginary to the real, there is a change in his feelings and sentiments corresponding in its suddenness to the change in his outward circum

stances.

In his distress, he can find no consolation except in the

remembrance of home, and in contemplating the sympathy which his misfortunes would be sure to kindle in the maternal breast. And when, on the day following his mishap, the "goody" condoles with him over the chilliness of his apartment, even her rude sympathy is a gratification to him.

The Sophomore, disliked by those below, and somewhat despised perhaps by those above him in College, looks to the fair sex for admiration of his bold deeds and hair-breadth escapes, and is more than repaid for the indifference of his fellow-students by the approving smile of some lovely maid.

The Junior's pipe and cigar, as they send up their white smoke toward the ceiling, seem, in his eyes, to wreath it into beautiful shapes, for which his memory or his imagination furnishes the models.

While the Senior fixes his hopes, not on his "Commencement" part or on his "degree," but on the loveliness which will gather to witness the successful termination of his College career, or on the presence at his "Class-Day" of some one beloved being.

The Freshman, who never enjoys but from a distance the beautiful sight which every "Exhibition-Day" reproduces, who never descends from his unobtrusive position in the Chapel gallery to the more dangerous and closer proximity of the lower floor, devotes, notwithstanding, as his daily journal attests, more space and more exclamation-marks to his description of "Exhibition" ceremonies than to any other one subject. While the Sophomore, whose brass enables him to take up a position in the rear of the audience, and blushingly to converse with friends in the back row of benches, the Junior, whose courage and dignity carry him successfully half down the aisle, and the Senior, who does not hesitate to penetrate to the neighborhood of the platform and chair of state, can find no words in which to express their appreciation of a day which surrounds them with so much that is lovely and lovable.

66

Class-Day" comes to every student as the brightest day of all the year. Even clouds and rain cannot render it otherwise. The church, at whose crowded door the undergraduate pushes and struggles, happy if he succeed in inserting (not his ear) a single eye beneath its roof, owes its chief attraction to the hosts of fair ones whose bright eyes glisten in the galleries, and whose gay bonnet-ribbons flutter as the fans rustle to and fro.

The beautiful elms in the College Yard, the rich green turf beneath them, and the music of the band sounding among their branches,

would be as nothing, did not fair woman grace the scene, and vie with the shadows in their dance upon the sod. The 66 spreads " would lose all their dignity and interest did not woman throng the narrow stairways and carry sunlight with her into the old College rooms, dark with the dust of ages. "Auld Lang Syne," and the dance round the tree, would appear but as a farce and a mockery, were not the windows of every surrounding building lighted by her face, smiling approval of the rude sport. The yard hung with lanterns, the music of the band, the singing of the glees, and the moonlight itself, would seem unmeaning without her. At the College races, be they on the river or the lake, her white kerchief waves encouragement from the house-top, or from the shady bank. Every Sunday she enlivens the chapel by her presence, and turns the current of our thoughts from the color of our coats to the color of our souls.

It might seem as if our mode of life, rough as it necessarily is, and the lack of woman's softening and refining influence during the greater part of four years, would unfit us for the enjoyment of her society at any time; but this is far from being the case. We learn to value her more as we discover of how much her absence deprives us, and a man rarely leaves College without a profound admiration of and respect for the fair sex.

There is probably no place where woman is more frequently thought of, and less frequently seen, than in College. We are scarcely aware how often she is in our thoughts. Even those of us who, when we come to College, never have been and scarcely ever expect to be in love, almost insensibly fall into the snare (if love be such) before we have been long beneath the College walls. We see the man who, as a Freshman, clung to the platform of the horse-car, and perhaps turned his back on the fair occupants of the interior, sitting as a Sophomore, a Junior, or a Senior in the midst of them; him who used best to enjoy the opera from the "Amphitheatre," occupying a seat in the "Balcony "; and him who once hated society stalking through a quadrille or whirling in a waltz.

One of our professors is reported once to have said, that no young man in College should fall in love before his Junior year, as such a "fall," taking place earlier than that period, would materially impair his College success. I am inclined, however, to differ from the professor, for it seems to me that the being in love, the having some one to please besides one's self, would be an incentive to, rather than a damper upon exertion. Be this as it may, however, it is certain

that woman's influence upon the student's character, whether it affect it for the better or the worse, is by no means small, and those who think that she has little to do with his enjoyment of College, and with the pleasure of his recollections of it, labor under a delusion.

As, in after life, we recall one by one the pleasantest scenes of our College experience, woman, almost unknown to us, gives the bright coloring to nearly all of them. As our thoughts revert to the "Old Chapel," we behold it, not as the room in which we hobbled through Roman history, or stretched our arms and spread our palms in gestures appropriate to assumed emotions, not even as the apartment in which we trembling awaited our sentence of admission to or rejection from College, but as the place in which again and again we have seen congregated the loveliness of the female sex, and listened to the whisper of soft and musical voices.

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The portal of the "New Chapel" is not the spot over which, for four years, we have stumbled morning after morning, in our hurried rush to prayers. It is the seat on which we sat on beautiful "ClassDay" nights, and beheld, not alone, the moon shining through the trees, and heard the soft strains of distant music, or watched the groups of saunterers in the yard.

The old church is not the building in which we delivered our oration, poem, or Commencement part, but that from whose gallery we received an approving glance or smile. We do not remember the College Yard as filled with students, flocking to and from recitations; but as resplendent with bright dresses and bonnets, and ringing with laughter and music. "Harvard Hall" is not the examination, but the ball room, and even the cosey window-seats in our own rooms are sacred, not from the contemplation of the merry hours we have studied, talked, smoked, and mused in them, but from the recollection of their having held, at some time or other, a fair form which is dear to us.

We cannot deny then, it seems to me, that in College, as everywhere else, we place great dependence on woman; that without her influence College life would lose half its attractions, and the memories of it half their interest. So that although disinclined to be sentimental, and heartily despising the idea of "Woman in College,” in the general acceptation of the expression, we shall be forced, nevertheless, to acknowledge that there is more of a certain kind of "Woman in College" than we had at first supposed; that is, that her occasional presence amongst us furnishes more food for our meditations, and gives more of a tone than we had been aware of, to our College life and recollections.

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