He shook hands and turned to open the door. As it closed behind him, there echoed faintly through the transom:
"Just wait till you see that little feller!"
RANDOLPH, '64
"For the good and the great, in their beautiful prime,
Through thy precincts have musingly trod—"
The roll of the national anthem died away and the veterans stood with bowed heads while the chaplain pronounced the benediction. Then the color bearer elevated the regimental flags, the drums tapped, and the gray-haired soldier boys, in straggling twos, marched slowly out of Saunders's Theater, through the flower-bedecked transept, and into the broad sunshine of Memorial Day. Ralph and I lingered in our seats until the crowd had thinned. In the flag-draped balcony above the platform the members of the band were hurriedly departing with their impedimenta; here and there little old ladies dressed in gray, were making their way with tardy steps toward the side exit; while all around the theater the open windows poured in a battery of mote-filled sunshine upon the deserted benches. The air was heavy with the soft fragrance of the elms outside, the faint odor of starched linen, of pine dust, and of flowers.
"There's a pair for you!" whispered Ralph, as an erect old gentleman accompanied by a white-haired negro came up the aisle. "I wish I knew who they were." He offered to wager large sums, based upon his alleged capacity for divination, that they were an "old grad," a Southerner, probably, and his body servant—"Old Marse" and "Uncle Ned." He instantly saw visions of them as characters in a story he was writing for one of the college papers. He is an imaginative boy.
We followed them out into the transept, and waited in the jog by the entrance while they made the round of the tablets, the white man reading the various inscriptions to his companion, who now and then would nod as if in recollection, and once furtively wiped his eyes with a frayed red-bordered silk handkerchief. The last we saw of them, they were picking their way across the car tracks of Cambridge Street in the direction of the Yard.
All the long spring afternoon, as we lay on the grass with our backs against the tree trunks, pretending to study, but really only watching the little gray denizens of the Yard intent upon their squirrel business, Ralph was making up stories about "Old Marse" and "Uncle Ned." I don't believe the chap read a line of his Stubbs on "Mediæval Architecture," and he was very loath to join me when I dragged him to his feet and said that it was time for supper.
Darkness had fallen when, two hours later, we joined the group of men gathered under the elms around the main entrance of Holworthy, where the Glee Club had assembled for one of its evening concerts. Everywhere the old buildings gleamed with light, for the examinations were on, and each window had its cluster of coatless occupants, who from time to time vociferously participated in mournful, lingering calls for "M-o-r-e." The odor of pipe smoke mingled with the sweet, humid breath of the grass and the subtle perfume of professors' gardens from distant Quincy Street; in the western sky a crescent moon, just peeping from behind the tower of Massachusetts Hall, shyly nestled in the tree tops; while between the great elms we could look, as we lay flat upon our backs, into an infinity of faintly twinkling worlds. Between songs you could hear the creaking of the pump in front of Hollis Hall, and the tinkle of the cup upon its chain as it was tossed heedlessly away by the thirsty wayfarer after he had availed himself of its humble services. Ralph and I, joyously entangled in the anatomy of a dozen classmates, drank in with rapture the never cloying melodies of "Johnnie Harvard," "The Miller's Daughter," "The Independent Cadets," and "A Health to King Charles," none of which old favorites escaped without a second rendition, and it was well on to nine o'clock when with a last