III

A triolet, I've always known

Is what they hang up poets by! I've even heard the victim groan. A triolet, I've always known Is just a gibbet, where 'tis shown That poetasters even die! A triolet, I've always known Is what they hang up poets by! Anna Jane Grannis. EXODUS

We have just moved. Mother droops exhausted in the only chair not honored with a monument of books. Father has kicked his weak ankle against the horny legs of an old-fashioned sewing machine and is cursing silently. My maiden aunt thumps vengeance on the half open window in her room that won't shut in its cast of fresh paint. The family temper is grinding. Moving day with its obligatto of packing and ripping up of carpets has frizzed everyone's nerves everyone's, except mine.

-

I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Moving is the best thrill I've had since I won the politeness medal in 5A.

Changing one's domicile is usually considered a vexacious, wearisome campaign of packing, furniture herding, and general upset. On the contrary, I believe that moving is an experience stuffed with neglected delights. If you bring a sensitive mood to the task you will enjoy the general racket.

Your first delight is the "Voyage of Discovery." The most interesting port is the store-room or the Glory Hole, as we used to call it in our house. What a miscellany of unused and forgotten objects crowd that room! Here's Dora, my doll, wigless and armless, her sawdust foot amputated by a rusty ice skate. Dora was my pal in days now in the gloaming. A shoe-box of tintypes lolls like a Tower of Pisa against the huge crummy Bible, that secret, sacred book that tells everyone's age on the front leaf. I can't picture my painfully lean aunt gleefully fat at sixteen! Yet there

she stands in her tintype taken at Coney Island. So almost every room is a foreign port of memories.

For weeks before you move you swell with satisfaction as you see the dumbwaiter sink with your rubbish, nightly. Lucy, our black kitchen clock, gave up the ghost about 1900. But father said Lucy had timed him for school. So this homely clock, greasy with cooking fumes, forever dumb because no clockmaker could duplicate the works,

squatted on the shelf like an invalid queen. God bless antique dealers. One finally adopted Lucy during the moving régime. So when you dispose of vases to the janitor's wife and phonograph records to the Salvation Army you feel shrived and clean-souled.

A further delight attends the last meal one eats in the old home to be evacuated on the morrow. This meal is more adventurously thrilling because you do the unconventional in your own home where routine has always reigned. Delicatessen rations have never been allowed on our table. Therefore I have hankered for deliciously oily potato salad and clammy wurst. The night before you move all pots and pans have a jamboree in the depth of a barrel. The family has to eat panless food or go hungry. So if you have a cold ham soul here's your chance to commit sin. The meal is quarter way advanced when someone wants the salt. The filled shakers and a bagful of salt lie at the bottom of the packed crockery box. Won't pepper do? It will not. So the pretty-tongued of the family borrows the next-door neighbor's salt shaker. Then sugar is wanted and found wanting. It, too, has gone to the Domino Ball in the bottom of the sugar barrel.

You next enjoy a one-act play in which moving men, those collarless chevaliers of the moving coach, are the actors. Pete - there is always a Pete in this leatheraproned crew is the runt of a man with decayed teeth to whom is apportioned the awkward jobs, like balancing the deer's head so that the anthers won't jab

his eyes out and manouvering the bread box so the knives, forks, spoons and cereals packed therein won't cascade down the stairs.

Then there's the Boss. Bosses perspire the most and do the least work. Our Boss was scholarly and musical in his way. He delighted in the easy joy of see-sawing down the stairs, the stairs, Gray's "Elegy" in one hand and father's thistleweight violin in the other.

When a large arm chair gets wedged between the radiator and the door in a dark, tapering private hall you have plot. We have such an arm chair in just such a crises. The three movers and the colored janitor could n't budge it. Suddenly Pete, doubled up like a deformed elf under the chair, discovered that the claw feet were meshed in cord that not only circuited the feet of the radiator but slithered along back, back, back into the kitchen.

Awaiting your furniture in the new empty rooms is a lonesome job. The survivals of the old home are coasting along you know not where. Then what a leap of joy you feel when the van turns the corner! I never knew I could get sentimental over an ordinary, white enamelled kitchen chair. Yet when it was the first burden deposited on the new floor I felt at home again. You are also pleasantly surprised at the transfiguration of the old furniture in the new rooms. We never could quite make out what the two figures in our tapestried lounge were doing. The lounge fitted in only one corner of our old living-room which was in perpetual eclipse. Now, in the light of a corner apartment, we spied those two figures kissing. You prize your upright piano more as you see it dangling in mid-air outside the window, like some heavenly body, the grain of its mahogany radiant in the sunshine. There is always a crowd on the street below watching the hoisting of a piano and somehow you feel they are also admiring the beauty of this particular one.

Father has stopped cursing; my aunt

THE KING'S BREAKFAST, By A. A. Milne: setting by H. Fraser-Simson.

We have all heard of the near tragedy of "The King's Breakfast" and why there was no butter "for the royal slice of bread," but we have not yet gained an insight into how it is to be sung (standproblems of the Queen (the purple dress ing on tip-toe) nor into the personal was important) nor been told why the cow slept at breakfast-time. This book gives not only this information, and another poem, "Feed My Cow," but also sets both poems to music as delightful as the verses themselves. A book indispensable to children who like to singstanding on tip-toe.

Hope Elizabeth Stoddard.

CAN YOU ANSWER THIS ONE? Remember how, in the pre-war days, In books you always read

That the girl tore strips from her petti

coat

To bandage the hero's head?

But now, with only a "step-in" on
(And that of Georgette, too)
When the hero falls on his manly head,
Just WHAT does the poor girl do?
Ethel Remington Hepburn.

Prizes

Rules

1. Each manuscript must be signed with a pen name and be accompanied by a sealed envelope containing the author's real name, address, and occupation, as, for instance: John Smith, Cambridge, Mass., Student.

2. There is no limit to the number of manuscripts which one person may submit. Send your manuscripts to Contest Editor, 311 College House, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass.

3. Manuscripts received before the 5th of each month will be considered for inclusion in the following issue: i. e., manuscripts received before February 5 will be considered for the March issue. All manuscripts, whether printed or not, will be considered for the Final Prize to be awarded at the close of the contest April 1, 1928.

4. All entries accompanied by a stamped return envelope will be returned at the close of the contest April 1, 1928.