As I turned to go, Sanderson yawned,
“Say, Priddy, could you run in with that print on Holbein’s ‘Saint Barbara?’ I failed to get it, and we have to recite on it, in the morning. You might bring me the dope on it, too!”
I entered at last upon the final stretch towards my degree. In the stress of work and the excitement of writing a philosophical and a literary essay, in competition for two senior prizes, the days of winter changed into the brighter aspects of spring almost before I was aware of it. Once more we assembled on the campus for the class “sing,” and this time my wife could enjoy the music with me, as we stood on the corner and let our year-old boy ask, “What?” when the cheers began.
The class elections were held, the photograph of the class was taken, backgrounded against a most rustic wall of stone and arrangement of wild shrubbery. Our caps and gowns soon followed the class pictures, and then we wore them to chapel, in which we marched so slowly and solemnly under the guide of our marshal, that more than one irrepressible spirit in the ranks would burst out with laughter at so much dignity in so youthful a crowd. Through these days I often grew impatient. I was eager, now, with restored health, and with a richer mine of truth, to be in a parish again, doing my chosen work.
But when commencement week arrived with its sentimental spirit,—then I felt the full significance of this last educational experience.
A band, brought from the city, gave concerts on the college club porch, amid a forest of plants and shrubs, and under fairylike illuminations. Class reunions brought crowds of graduates, who donned yellow hats, wore clownish clothes, and paraded up and down seeing how much burlesque they could express. One class engaged an Italian hand-organ artist who had also, perched on his music-box, an intelligent parrot which would pick out fortune slips from a box—for five cents. In some way the class lost the parrot, and I came across the Italian boy, crying bitterly, as he searched a wild gully for the bird, saying, when I asked him what the trouble could be,
“Ah, my parrote, he los’, my God, what I do for live now!”
Meanwhile the renters of the organ sat in an automobile and raced back and forth down the main street while it scattered its wheezy music along the trail of gasolene fumes.
On one corner, a group of distinguished-looking men and women stood in the dry gutter, with slips of paper in their hands, singing with more or less effect, and great seriousness,
“Oh, the class of ’Eighty odd,