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Most janitors are humble men. In their dingy cubbyholes, in their burrows beneath houses, they sit through the day quietly, watching the furnace fire or listening to the rumble of boilers in which cold water churns upward to dribble languidly out of faucets marked "hot." Their reading is confined to yesterday's newspapers; sleepy, happy woodchucks, they do not care to see their own names on the front pages. They are content.

Some janitors are exceptions. They spend the long days of their undifficult existence revolving and maturing hot thoughts of fame. One of them a fortnight ago (TIME, Oct. 10) crawled to the front pages of U. S. newssheets by calling himself "organizer and president of the World League of Cities," by inviting all kinds of potentates to a convention in Boston where he lives. Another, who inhabited a Brooklyn cellar while he wrote poetry and played a stringed instrument, is on trial for butchering an old lady. Last week a third janitor came to a measure of fame.

Michael Bonney, though, was not one of these janitors whose business is to hoist dumbwaiters and trundle garbage pails, beating upon them. He was numbered among janitors who waddle through the hallways of innumerable college dormitories. To alumni a legend of competence, to faculty members a jovial rock of propriety, to students a genial but unyielding tyrant, he had spent 54 years of his life upon the campus of the College of the City of New York. As his father had done when Michael Bonney was only a small, destructive hobbledehoy, he gave his time to tidying bedrooms and fixing lamps, sweeping up broken bottles, locking doors and reading magazines which he found in baskets. Last week he decided to retire.

The faculty of the College of the City of New York, certain that Michael Bonney was the finest college janitor in the U. S., prepared a banquet for him. Anxious to make merry, they publicly gave him the "degree" of Past Master of Janitorial Science. They gave him a watch. President Frederick B. Robinson said: "We can't pretend to Michael Bonney. He knows us inside and out just as he knows the college inside and out."

There were other speeches, but none was so genuinely witty, so suave, so good and unpretentious as the one which Michael Bonney made. Said he:

"There is not one here that I shall not always bear in my heart with affection and loyal gratitude. I am not worthy of all the good things that have been said about me, and I am not worthy of this gift--this timely gift, I might say, It is timely because my old Ingersoll gave out last summer and I had to borrow a watch from my son. I'll never forget this night."

After this, the faculty members, full of conviviality, sang "Auld Lang Syne." Their voices, Michael Bonney considered, were rather bad. But he said nothing. A humble man, he stood gently smiling around at his friends. He was content.