for graduate members there are famous

reunions.

This characteristic of Pi Eta and Pudding plays, all of which at present are original, is noteworthy-their intrinsic excellence. Several of them have been put successfully on the professional stage. Words and music are the work of undergraduate members, though a professional musician often orchestrates the score. They are almost always nowadays burlesques or comic operas. The late Herbert Schurz, the son of Carl Schurz, and a Pudding man, several years ago wrote most of the book of a burlesque on Secret Service, and acted the chief part in it. Another recent Pudding burlesque was The Second Mrs. Corsetstay. the spring of 1902 the Pudding curtain raiser made fun of If I Were King. It was called Were I the Thing. One of the two authors was J. A. Dix, son of the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix. In another recent Pudding play, Hi-Ka-Yá, the scene shifted from an Arctic village to the Sheepshead Bay racetrack, Santos-Dumont and his airship, and wireless telegraphy and the automobile being used.

In

A feature of the Pi Eta play in April, 1902, Queen Philippine, was the Japanese sword dance, known only to members of noble Japanese families, which was given by Hydesaburo Ohashi, a Japanese of noble blood and a Pi Eta man. The sword Ohashi used had been for many hundred years an heirloom in his family. The 1903 Pi Eta play, Prince Punjab, made a particular hit. The plot hinged on the superstition of the people of India in regard to an idol's ear. The work of John C. Miller, Harvard 1901, in Pi Eta theatricals was noteworthy.

At the club theatres, of course, the chief rehearsing is done, though to be sure neither of these organisations is wholly dramatic; each has its social features and each an excellent library. The Pi Eta theatre is exceptionally large, seating about five hundred, and well equipped. The society, organised by members of the class of 1866, had a theatre, stage and green room as far back as the early '70's, and when it went into its present commodious house in Winthrop Square, to get the best facilities for plays was a chief concern. It began giving plays about twenty years ago.

The present Pudding house, in Holyoke Street, was built in 1888, but the club dates back to 1795. In 1871, $4,000 was spent to remodel the four rooms in Stoughton Hall granted for its use, and to build a stage and green room. The club came to give plays as the result of a natural development, beginning with mock trials, then costuming those who took part in the trials; and then-but a step-the drama. The first play given was Bombastes Furioso, in 1844, in a member's room.

In 1851. Lend Me Five Shillings was given by the Pudding. Joseph H. Choate appeared as Sam in one of the productions of this. All along the years until the early '60's standard comedies were played. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., now Justice Holmes of the United States Supreme Court, took the part of Sam in Raising the Wind, in 1860. He and Austen G. Fox also played in Othello with other Pudding men. Senator Lodge was one of the two authors in the early '70's of a Pudding burlesque on Don Giovanni, and Barrett Wendell, in the '70's, wrote for it a little comedy called Poison. To mention a few Pudding men, the Oliver Wendell Holmeses were, each in his time, secretary and poet, as was Joseph H. Choate; Wendell Phillips and James Coolidge Carter were among its presidents; James Russell Lowell and Theodore Roosevelt among its secretaries, Mr. Lowell having been its poet also; and Charles Sumner, George Bancroft and the Rev. Dr. W. E. Channing among its members, in addition to Bishop Brooks and Senators Hoar and Lodge.

Owen Wister, another well-known Pudding man, wrote both the libretto and the music for a burlesque on the story of Dido and Eneas, Mr. Wister himself taking the part of Pius Æneas, and being dressed as a Greek below the waist and above the waist as Professor Charles Eliot Norton, whom Harvard men, then as at present, liked gently to satirise. The Venus in this burlesque was Henry U. Hardon, now a well-known New York lawyer, and he made his first appearance in tights on a trapeze. One of the properties was a bucket for Æneas to weep into. Mr. Wister's class was '82, and every class in Pudding since then has produced at least one original play. Evert

Jansen Wendell, another '82 man, was also actively identified with Pudding theatricals.

Other organizations at Harvard that are active in dramatics are the Delta Upsilon, the Cercle Français and the Deutscher Verein, but along wholly different lines from those of Pi Eta and Pudding. The Delta Upsilon presents each year one of the Elizabethan comedies other than those of Shakespeare. There is nothing. original about the performance, but it is ambitious, great pains being taken to reproduce the comedy exactly, and it is given several times. The Cercle Français, in which James H. Hyde was and is much interested, gives annually a revival of some French play, often one of Molière's. The year Cyrano de Bergerac was first produced in America the Cercle revived a play by the Cyrano of history. The University of Pennsylvania Cercle Français also gives French plays. The Deutscher Verein at Harvard gives German plays. The Cambridge Dramatic Club, though not entirely a college organisation, has among its members many Harvard men. Harvard's Latin department has given plays in the original, and the Greek department has given Greek plays, including Edipus Tyrannus, in the original, as has the Greek department of the University of Pennsylvania, all with notable success. Two years ago the Greek department at Stanford gave the Antigone of Sophocles, first at the university and afterwards at several places throughout the State.

It is at the University of California, however, that Greek plays should have most success. The president, Dr. Wheeler, was professor of Greek at Cornell before he went to California. The university accepted from William Randolph Hearst last September an open-air theatre, a reproduction of the classic Dionysian theatre at Epidaurus, Greece.

This

structure is in two parts, the stage being 122 feet long and 28 feet deep, surrounded by a wall 42 feet high. The theatron itself is semi-circular, 254 feet in diameter, and has two concentric tiers of seats. The faithfulness to the original is remarkable, and there is nothing quite like it in the world. The dedication was fittingly marked by a performance of the Birds of Aristophanes.

The Spanish tinge in everything Californian is seen plainly in both the big universities there, and evidence of this so far as dramatics are concerned is found in the plays given in Spanish. Last October at Stanford the Spanish Club gave in Spanish Calderon Contra Ramsey, written by two Stanford students. At the University of California a play in the original is presented each year by the students in Spanish. At California the Skull and Keys Society gives an annual play, the seniors on Class Day present an extravaganza, and on Charter Day, the university's birthday, an old English play is given under the auspices of the English department. At Stanford the English Club last year presented The Knights of the Burning Pestle, and the French Club presented a French play.

At Cornell a most interesting custom is that of the Savage Club, founded largely through the aid of Professor Morse Stephens of Cornell, an Oxford graduate and a member of the Savage Club of London, in entertaining after their performances well-known actors who come to Ithaca. The chief Cornell dramatic organisation is the Masque. This elects its members on the basis of

competition, and several plays are given each year with marked success. It gave a few years ago The Taming of the Shrew. Its play this coming winter will be entitled Her. It is an adaptation of one of Sidney Grundy's farces. The Savage Club will give at Ithaca this December a burlesque entitled Mrs. Renigs of the Cribbage Match, a title which the compositor and the proofreader on one of the Cornell publications the other day managed to twist into Mrs. Re's Wiggs of the Cribbage Patch. The author of this burlesque is Louis A. Fuertes, '97, the illustrators, D. T. Wells, '04, and R. L. Dempster, '04. Mr. Dempster will have a song and dance at the performance with the euphonious title of Boozie Suzie. Last year, under the auspices of the French department, L'Anglais tel qu'on le parle and La poudre aux yeux were produced. Professor Olmstead especially took an active interest in them.

An open secret, in the real sense of that misused term, is that the sophomorejunior fraternities at Yale give plays at

"It

their initiations. These fraternities, Psi Upsilon, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Alpha Delta Phi and Zeta Psi, occupy "tombs" after the Yale fashion. A chief feature of these "tombs," the general arrangement of which the late John Addison Porter, President McKinley's secretary, a most enthusiastic Yale man, has described, are their theatres. was left to the mother chapter of D.K.E.. at Yale," Mr. Porter wrote, "in 1861, to perfect an appropriate and feasible building for all colleges, to rear it in suitable materials and to furnish it with complete appointments: In appearance a well-proportioned Greek temple, whose interior plan provided an assembly room for grand occasions, a smaller hall for ordinary meetings, facilities for dramatic entertainments and banquet festivities, space for the preservation of archives and the storing of relics." The initiations of these four societies take place the same nights in the spring and fall of each year, and the plays then given are made occasions for great gatherings of the societies' alumni, including many who come to New Haven from afar for the purpose. Usually these productions are light in character and usually they are written by members of the society. No outside coaches are employed and no outsiders see the plays, for only fraternity members are allowed inside the "tombs." Much about the productions, however, finds its way out. The work that William, or "Doc." Clyde, a member of the well-known Philadelphian family, and a member of the Class of 1901 at Yale, did in Psi U theatricals was locally famous, particularly his presentations of the easy man of the world.

In 1900 the Yale Dramatic Association was formed. Now so strong and successful, it started under difficulties. It had no social help at all. The members of the play-giving fraternities looked without enthusiasm on it. But it had the spirit and it throve. Frank Lea Short, a professional coach, did a great deal for the Association, and Professor William Lyon Phelps, of the English Department, also took a great personal interest in it. Its productions are ambitious. Its first offerings were two old English plays, The Pardoner's Tale and the Secundum Pastorum. Since then it has given Thomas

Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, with two hundred students taking part, many of whom comprised the temporary audience that was part of the production; Sheridan's Critic; High Life Below Stairs; and, last spring, Goldsmith's The Good Natured Man. At the Yale bicentennial two years ago the Yale Dramatic Association presented in an open air amphitheatre before 9,000 people, including 5,000 Yale graduates, more than half the living Yale men, a most successful series of historical pictures of Yale life, old and new. The first of them was The Founding of Yale-1701, and among the others were Washington at Yale-1775, and The Execution of Nathan Hale1776. The Yale Dramatic Association is limited to thirty-five men, chosen by competition, and in the fall of 1902, to fill the fifteen vacancies in the club, no fewer than one hundred and six men responded

The Psi Upsilon chapter at Wesleyan gives a play every spring. At Cornell an important feature of the elaborate Junior Week festivities every February is the play that Psi Upsilon gives at its home on the edge of Cascadilla Gorge.

Organised in 1882, Princeton's Triangle Club has had a most gratifying play-giving history, and among its members have been James Barnes, Booth Tarkington and "Bill" Morse. At first the plays it gave were by prominent authors, but about 1890 a musical comedy written by undergraduates was produced and that has been the policy ever since. The play in 1900, The King of Pomery, was so well received that it was played throughout the next year, and last year's one, The Mullah of Miasma, was shown in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia in addition to the two Princeton performances.

Interest in dramatics at Columbia centres in the annual ""Varsity Show." The Mischief Maker, produced last year, was under the auspices of Kings Crown, a literary and social organisation, and it was seen at Carnegie Lyceum, New York, during the entire week of March 23, with performances every evening and with a Saturday matinee. It was an original comic opera in two acts, the scene being laid on the planet Venus, with thirteen Columbia men in the cast, thirty in the chorus and thirty-five in