Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/155

 the history and traditions of the chapter about which he is writing. The older man, too, should have corrected or outgrown some of the sophomoric rhetoric with which these letters so much abound.

For some months I have been carrying on a weekly correspondence with a young boy at "prep" school whose guardian I am and in whose intellecual, physical, and moral progress I have no little interest. His letters to me are full of the results of football games, of parties, of "Bojack" parades, of escapades off campus. I am interested in these matters, of course, but the things I want most to know he is not likely to mention. I was reviewing his Latin with him at Christmas time and came to a chapter of Cæsar with which he was totally unfamiliar. "They had that while I was in the hospital," he explained to me. "When were you in the hopsital?" I asked, somewhat in surprise. "Oh, in November," he replied, "Didn't I write you about that?" And so incidentally it came out during his vacation that he was taking piano lessons, that there had been a fire in his dormitory, that his roommate had had scarlet fever, and that he had failed his mathematics. He was quite surprised to find that he had neglected to tell me any of these things in his letters, or that I should be interested in their recital. What to me was vital