Education: P.B.K.T.B.

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It has never been said of members of Phi Beta Kappa that they toil not. But sometimes they have been accused of not spinning; of not contributing anything save an air of distinction, or pedantry, to their college community.

From Harvard came news. There those who, by dint of native ability or sustained effort, had achieved the personal triumph of a "key," would now transfer some of their attention to furthering the common weal, and to lining their own pocketbooks. Nothing could be more practical, nothing more just than the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Tutoring Bureau, for laggard students before the mid-year examinations, announced last week. Many a smart, shrewd Phi Beta Kappan has before this undertaken tutoring as a private enterprise. Never before has a chapter of the national hierarchy of scholarship lent its official seal. The new departure was presumably an evidence of Phi Beta Kappa's intention, announced during its recent endowment drive, to take an active part in U. S. education.

Ely Fire

Fire ate up Ely Court, fashionable school for finishing young ladies, at Greenwich, Conn. Red tongues danced upon a rooftree and gobbled earthward far faster than firemen could pump water from a nearby lake. Fleeing with such midnight garments and belongings as they could snatch up, the owners and principals, Miss Elizabeth Ely and her sister, Mrs. Sara (sic) Parsons, could only give thanks that none but themselves, the housekeeper and some servants were in the long, tall building. The 100 or so young ladies were safely home for holidays. It was just 40 years since the Misses Ely had founded their school, to accommodate the daughters of once-fashionable Brooklyn, N. Y. With the shift of social tides, the Misses Ely—Elizabeth, Sara and Mary Boies (deceased)— had removed to Riverside Drive, Manhattan. Jews had encroached, apartment houses had towered. In 1906 the school had migrated to its final resting place on a green Connecticut hilltop. Now it lay in ashes, the ashes of $1,500,000, of which only a $500.000 phoenix would arise in insurance. Parents with daughters in need of finishing, friends of all that is genteel and established in private education, waited to see if the Ely sisters, now in their age, would permit fire to terminate a tradition which years and geography could never change.

Partners Again