Some of these men who fail to find a place in the social community meet their isolation grimly and are embittered against life. Others, after a few months or a year of lonesomeness and neglect, give up their university career broken-hearted, and by so doing perhaps take the first step in a life of failures. One man of whom I happened to know confided to his daily themes a depth of misery of which it can only be hoped that it was hysterical. At night when he heard a step on his staircase he prayed that it might be some one coming to see him. The tide of undergraduate life and of joy in living flowed all about him and left him thirsting. If a man finds sweetness in the uses of such adversity, it can only be by virtue of the firmest and calmest of tempers. Sometimes fellows starve physically without a friend with whom to share their hardship, living perhaps on bread, milk, and oatmeal, which they cook over the study lamp. Occasionally one hears disquieting rumors that such short rations have resulted in disease and even death before the authorities were aware. If this be so, the hardships of life in the earliest mediæval university, though far enough removed from us to be picturesque, could hardly have been more real. The sickness of the body politic has been portrayed with artistic sympathy and veracity by Mr. C. M. Flandrau, in his "Harvard Episodes," the wittiest and most searching of studies of undergraduate life. It is no doubt for this reason that the book is both read and resented by the healthy and unthinking college man. To dwell on such individual instances would be unpleasant. The point of importance is to show how the social chaos affects the health of the community as a whole. As it happens, we have a barometer. For better or for worse, the moving passion of the undergraduate body, aside from studies, is athletic success. If athletics prosper, it is because the life of the college finds an easy and natural expression; if athletics languish, there is pretty sure to be some check on wholesome functioning.