"Commem" Week

Oxford was "down." The summer vacation had begun. "Schools" (exams) were over. Yet Oxford, last week, was crowded with formidable dowagers, jovial "guvnors," dainty debutantes in the joiliest of raiment and under the absurdest of parasols, all being escorted by be-flanneled undergraduates. "Commem" (Commemoration) Week had started seven days of endless pleasure. Up the "High," down the "Broad," along the "Corn" strolled British society. Every available lodging was taken. No money could buy or hire a punt, for they were already thick upon the water of the Isis.

College visiting, a favorite sport among the aged, was in full swing. From the "House" (Christ Church) to the "Skimmery" (St. Mary's Hall), not forgetting "Pemmy" (Pembroke), "Wuggins" (Worcester College), "Teddy" Hall (St. Edmund's Hall), "Jaggers" (Jesus College), "B. N. C." (Brasenose College), "Quaggers" (Queens College), hoary men, rejuvenated for the . time being, revisited the haunts of their college days.

The Week, brilliant at its best or at its worst, was doubly brilliant this year, for the King, as Visitor of Christ Church,* was on hand to celebrate the founding of that great College 400 years before by His Eminence Cardinal Wolsey. The "House," as Christ Church is always called, was naturally the cynosure; and, one night, after "Old Tom" had been tolled 101 times* a vast throng of women, some dressed in the best that Jay's and Liberty's could afford, others in the latest and most gorgeous and flimsy from Paris, began to enter under the imposing tower on St. Aldates into "Tom Quad," illuminated by hundreds of lanterns. Through the archway in the far, left-hand corner, out into the older part of the college toward the Meadows, familiar music greeted the visitors. In the great Dining Hall, none other than Vincent Lopez "and his band," hale and hearty from Yankee-doodledum, were forcing toes to jazz with his syncopated music while the dowagers and fond mamas awaited expectantly for the engagements that would be announced that night.

And after the "House" ball, perchance a Magdalen ball, a "Quaggers" ball and many other balls, at which the most sumptuous refreshments are served in an atmosphere unostentatiously aristocratic, Oxford will run its eyes, yawn and fall fast asleep for the summer.

*The office of Visitor is an ecclesiastical dignity of honorary importance in most cases connected with the bishopric of Oxford. The "House" and some other colleges have the right to elect their own Visitors. The King visited the "House," not as King, but as the ecclesiastical successor of Cardinal Wolsey. *Every night at 9.05 o'clock, white the scholars are in residence, "Old Tom" is tolled 101 times, the number being determined by the original number of the foundation.