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Dawn

In much the same light as the Aramoho goods train, shunted into a siding at Paekakariki, sees the Night and Day Limiteds glide unconcernedly past and disappear in the distance, Victoria College has for many years viewed with fortitude the progression of her contemporaries. Auckland had grounds and an eating Paradise; Otago had compulsory gowns and the support of Dunedin; Canterbury had better hakas and residential Halls. They had everything, and Victoria nothing at all. So the Wikitorians, hungry and precarious in their crippled buildings, cold and gownless in their draughty corridors, shunned, yet pitied, by the local inhabitants, humiliated and finally self-abased, released their constitutional claims and retreated into the bleak strongholds of indifference.

Everyone jeered and called it a night-school. Someone looked up the definition and exposed the shattering truth—Victoria College was, as suspected, a mere night-school. All the students—even those who were there only in the day-time—were night-school students.

O, Degradation!

And long before this day, things had been going from bad to worse. Students' Association Executives came and went—each unit arranging the Club Dances to perfection, presenting their annual Balance Sheets, smiling very prettily into the photographers' cameras, and hanging their own photographs all over Noah's Ark; but beyond effecting these little services, apparently they accomplished nothing.

The Tennis Courts were badly laid out, the grounds have only very recently been cultivated, no provision has ever been made for a new Gymnasium Block, the annual award of "Blues" has not once until this year been recorded in the ancient tome provided for the purpose; "Spike" has only this year been collected by the Executive and filed away, and last year the Professorial Board, with its examination reforms, was actually prevented from continuing at will its ravages upon the soul-weary students.

Something is afoot. A faint grey light shines out of the darkness. A few students of dynamic energy, realising that only too well the archives of history have been marked by the continual application of the age-old law that fitness is necessary if a community is to survive, have turned the light of general opinion on the Cafeteria, which has been connected with perhaps one of the most glaring exhibitions of moral torpor, decadence and unconscious stoicism in Collegiate history.

The other Colleges have introduced the wearing of gowns by undergraduates. Admittedly, we have no hoary tradition to warrant the adop page 6 tion of this medieval indication of learning—but if it will help to raise the tone and spirit of the College—let us have them.

Here, in the gloom of our mortification, the first blush of self-reproach appears. Streaks of light, in the form of green and gold pennants, are splitting the lowering clouds. The mist is rising and with it a new process of nominating candidates for the Executive. The carolling birds announce that the Women's Club is to have a new name. The blush deepens, the clouds are touched with crimson and the Tennis Club is granted a sum of money for improvements. A cock crows; our digestive organs will soon be on the road to convalescence. A milk-man outside drops a quart bottle; gowns—in the name of Mountjoy!—are "stealing upon the night and melting the darkness."

Came the Dawn.

—Z.Z.Z.