The Weir Dismissals.

(The Editor, "Smad")

And now the older residents have been asked to leave so that more and yet more freshers can be made grist to the Mill of Unthought, called Weir. We might have known that the ruler (not Dr. Sutherland, but His Majesty the Merry Monarch Mediocrity) would manage to exile most of those who used to oppose his rule. For last year the steadiness, the sanity and the sense of a few moderately matured minds provided a little leaven—but now we have practically only the unleavened lump of freshers who haven't learnt to think and civil servant caricatures who can never learn.

Let the sensitive resident brave the dining-room for the occasional nutriment or the common-room for page 11 the glimpse of a newspaper and he finds neither intelligent discussion nor keen wit, hut facile flippancy, childish chaff, boyish bull and smirking smut. He flees instinctively from the foetid fellows and with patience and good fortune may find in some quiet study that rara avis—a resident who can make interesting conversation.

Surely it is better that a few freshers should quarrel lividly with lazy land-ladies and perhaps even succumb in the boarding-house struggle for existence, than that dozens of freshers and other junior students should have their vitality sapped by stagnation in the pride of their youth. For such is the fate of the many who take the mill for a fair sample of University tradition and adult life. I fear mightily for many an immature mind that the Mill is moulding. I fear not for my own—for I seek the company of the very few who are in the Mill but not of it, who stand aloof and are cantankerous enough and old enough to be able to oppose the Merry Miller's sovereignty.

Why am I still there ? Frankly, because my body loves hot showers. But my soul prays for the days when I, too, shall be sent a billet doux to tell me that I am not one of those for whom the Mill was intended. Till then, the student stands by, eagerly hoping—"How long?"

—Junius.