FUMEMUS!

We have with us tonight a Senior Smoker--or rather the Senior Smoker, for the class of 1919 will have no other this year. It will be a smoker with all the trimmings that please some and bore others; rows of long wooden tables; plates of cheese and pretzels, movies in which Douglas Fairbanks will climb all ever the wrinkled sheet hung at the end of the Living Room, and the inevitable speeches. It is altogether fitting that the Seniors should celebrate in the manner of their pre-war Freshman and Sophomore years the last evening before they conceal their physical eccentricities and their precarious relations with the College Office beneath caps and gowns.

But this smoker, like all others in the University, will be a business meeting as much as a social gathering. It is only at such affairs that a class can discuss matters of common interest, launch its plans, and find exactly where it stands. And if the present Senior Class, the only class which has bridged the gap from peace times to peace times, does not revive the traditions to be discussed this evening, more than one Harvard custom will be thrown into the discard because of the war. Primarily there is Class Day and Commencement Week; no other class now in College has seen those festivities except under war conditions. Secondly, there is to be a picnic, to be financed by the Freshmen as 1919 financed the corresponding frolic of 1916. It has now been three years since Seniors have embarked for the mythical island for a long day's celebration. And finally there is the question of caps and gowns and their wearing. All these topics must be considered.

News that the 1921 Smoker has been indefinitely postponed, because the Cambridge Fire Department will not allow the holding of two successive parties in the Union, is at best mysterious. Does the Fire Department fear that two such gathering will result in a combustible effect? Or does the Fire Chief consider that the left-over warmth of one evening will mean no less than sheer conflagration the next? Frankly, we are puzzled. Perhaps the Department's statistician has slightly miscalculated the average life of an undergraduate cigarette.

But all this is beside the point. Go forth, Seniors, and celebrate once more in the room where you were welcomed as Freshmen, where you dined as Sophomores, and where you danced as Juniors.