A GLIMPSE OF HARVARD.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3383, 18 July 1927, Page 7

A GLIMPSE OF HARVARD.

(By Lady Adams.) Cambridge, Mass., is, of course, Harvard, for everything in the httle town centres round “The Yard,’ as they call the college grounds. The shops in the immediate neighborhood of the college gates cater almost exclusively for men. 1 wanted some darning worsted one day, and had to walk the shopping length of one street and half-way down another before 1 found a shop the outside of which held out the slightest hopes. There is the Cambridge Co-operative, of course, pronounced “Coop”—where my professor, who lectured here all last spring, told me I could buy “simply everything in reason.” Evidently darning worsted is not “in reason.” But boots, and sweaters, and “half-hose,” and pipes, and “smart wear for gents,” of all kinds abound in the Cambridge shops. * The undergraduates are interesting. A great many of them wear fur coats—with the fur outside, of the shaggiest description, and they go bare-headed. On wet clays they wear rubber .coats and rubber hoots and rubber hats, and as the women students at Badelili'o Hall, just round the corner from the college, wear exactly the same, Harvard Square on a stormy day is monotonous.

The women students wear fur coats, too, and in the snow, long snow-boots, called “zippers,” so named from the zipping, sound made us the wearer swiftly fastens them with a little metal catch that she runs up to the top. But even if the Radcliffe student is bareheaded and short-haired one can always tell her from her brother, by what seems to the elderly and uninitiated a piece of very bright pink flesh between her calves and her knees.

“Expensive silk stockings, the others know.” The Radcliffe student does all her shopping in Boston: she must.

But the really smart men do not wear their fur outside. Their coats are furlined, without,a hair of it showing; not a. fur collar on your life. The wise know the fur-lined coat by the exquisite looseness at the small of the hack, and' by the cut of the sleeves. And with a fur-lined coat go a bowler and English leather gloves. Harvard Square is, 1 imagine, one of the well-known danger zones of the world. Motor-cars and buses come at you from all sides, quickly and surely, and the only thing to do is to hare across, like Tennyson’s Brook, in and out, and round about. Once inside the Yard the world is yours. There are little raised duck-boards along every path, to keep ns all out of the mud, and in Harvard spring comes the day and hour that the duck boards are removed.

The older professors, and some of the undergraduates—naturally not those with fur-lined coats —carry the tools of their trade in green baize bags of the most devastating simplicity; sometimes over their shoulder, sometimes absentmindedly trailing, often tucked under their arm. These green baize hags arc to ;ne the most characteristic sight in Cambridge.

•The Widener Library is even more wonderful than I thought it was going to he, and friendly powers having come to my aid, 1 spend long hours amongst all the books I want, without let or hindrance.

There is one movie-picture house in the square, and no theatre- at all, but there are good concerts given under the University auspices, and; certainly it is not clubs and debates, and dances, and dinners, and smokers that lack. Cambridge, Mass., is curiously like Cambridge, Eng., on a foggy, wettish. grey afternoon, when the crews are practising, and the boats are seen through mist. It is all enchanting here; the likenesses to our Cambridge arc so many, the differences so few; we are in the midst of a friendly people, who have welcomed ns, and who show ns that exquisite hospitality that one associates with America—Jar-reaching and thoughtful. \