There is one Wednesday morning, the last in May, when the sun, peeping over the observatory dome on Mount Hamilton and flooding the wide valley of Santa Clara, wakes unfeelingly a reluctant set of mortals to the realization that this is the last of their mornings.
The girl in Roble who has lived four happy, independent years where the winds of freedom blow, and who is going back this afternoon to the household duties and narrow sympathies of a not over-interesting home, leans thoughtfully on the foot-rail of her iron bed; the dear, familiar view blurs as she gazes out beyond the dormitory room and its reminiscent treasures of program and photograph, out where the warm light brightens the concrete pillars of the museum and the arboretum with its waving tops, and makes the whole fair landscape one Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The Encina student who has slaved his uneasy way, with no resources save his willingness to do anything that may help him from one semester to the next, springs exultantly from his alcove, for to-day he has finished the struggle, and there is a good job waiting for him.
Over in the fraternity house, the man who has sung his grasshopper songs in careless disregard of changing seasons, and who has found some impossible examinations barring his primrose path, blinks painfully at the merciless sun of Commencement Day, laughing at him above the roofs of siren Mayfield, and holds his foolish head in his hands; for last night, while the other Seniors, full of honors and regrets, were trying to choke down a little of the good-bye supper after the Promenade, he went a bit too far in celebrating his mixed emotions of grief at flunking and joy at coming back again.
Upon all alike—upon him who has watched for it, dreading it through four enchanted years, as upon him who has forgotten until the list of candidates for graduation glared at him from the registrar's bulletin-board with a vacancy in that section where his name ought to be; upon him who has hoped for this as a commencement in very truth of things great and new, as upon him who cares not—shines this early sunlight of the last Wednesday in May.
There is never a cloud in the sky this morning; the meadow lark sings more joyously than on any other day; the campus is more radiantly beautiful, because some hundred and fifty people are looking at it through tears for the last time.
On his own Commencement Day, Tom Ashley lay sleeping, hidden away from the splendor of the morning, two-score miles from the smiling campus.
The man lying next him in the upper tier but one rolled over and shook him by the shoulder:
"Wake up, Tom; it's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?"