The campus was crowded with friends of the graduating class, and of the Seniors in particular. It was a very gay scene, for the June day was perfect and the company were brightly dressed. The girls, however, including the graduating class, were dressed in white only. Mrs. Tellingham had established that custom some years before, and the different classes were distinguished only by the color of their ribbons.
Helen Cameron’s twin brother, Tom, and Madge Steele’s brother, Bob, attended the Seven Oaks Military Academy, not many miles from Briarwood. Their graduation exercises and “Breaking Up,” as the boys called it, were one day later than the same exercises at Briarwood. So the girls did not start for home until the morning of the latter day.
Old Dolliver, the stage driver, brought his lumbering stage to the end of the Cedar Walk at nine o’clock, to which point Tony Foyle, the man-of-all-work, had wheeled the girls’ baggage. Ruth, and Helen, and Mercy Curtis had bidden their room good-bye and then made the round of the teachers before this hour. They gathered here to await the stage with Jennie Stone, Madge and Mary Cox. The latter had agreed to be one of the party at Lighthouse Point and was going home with Heavy to remain during the ensuing week, before the seashore party should be made up.
The seven girls comfortably filled the stage, with their hand luggage, while the trunks and suitcases in the boot and roped upon the roof made the Ark seem top-heavy. There was a crowd of belated pupils, and those who lived in the neighborhood, to see them off, and the coach finally rolled away to the famous tune of “Uncle Noah, He Built an Ark,” wherein Madge Steele put her head out of the window and “lined out” a new verse to the assembled “well-wishers”:
“And they didn’t know where they were at,
One wide river to cross!
Till the Sweetbriars showed ’em that!
One wide river to cross!
One wide river!
One wide river of Jordan–