The Undergraduate Chair
With football practically out of the way, we sit back and think. Curiously enough, although the week-ends have had all that peerade week-ends traditionally have, it wasn't- of them that we thought. Rather, it was of Hanover, the Hanover that we feel so proud about as we walk through the Gothicness of Yale and the sturdy formalism of Harvard. We feel quite certain that we don't despise either of these latter institutions; it's merely that we feel slightly sorry for them, sorry because they can't know the dark heaviness of autumnal mornings and the cheery brisk brightness of an afternoon on Norwich Hill. Neither can they know the full and clean feeling of freedom which took us one day just before Harvard week-end. We walked out over the golf course with a brisk wind swirling the first snowfall about our ears. Trees were struggling to keep their last few withered leaves, and the ski-jump, a black outline, seemed almost ready for business against the grey sky. . Headlights bumped and flickered along the Lyme Road, and the straggling last twosome seemed a pretty empty gesture against the bleak background. The dimly etched ridge of the faroff mountains sent the same sort of shoot along our spines that must have prompted someone or other when they wrote "This is my own, my native land, etc." Then we thought, with that little self-satisfied thrill which always comes with the early advent of winter here, of other lesser places in the throes of the dank winter which first comes off the ocean. And we thought too of the horde of letters which would leave Hanover carrying the complacent news that snow was on our doorsteps already. . . . and as we walked back through the Vale of Tempe, we wondered idly if the snow would leave until next spring, for it had already rifted into a bank against one side of the valley . . . and we wondered too why the sheen of ice over Occom Pond didn't seem to faze the ducks paddling about on the slight unfrozen space and when and where they'd finally go . . .
RIDING IN NORWICH
