How’s your throat? Better, I hope. Hers is lovely--“like a piece of marble column”--at least that’s what Reggie confided to me at 3 G. M. this morning. J. F. AS TOLD BY HER The waiters had served the coffee and were retiring in long rows down the sides of the big dining-hall. The rattle of knives and forks and the noise of general and animated talk were subsiding, and the pleased, expectant hush which always precedes the toasts, was falling upon the assembly. At the lower end of the room, farthest from the “distinguished-guest” table, the unimportant people began to turn their chairs around toward the speakers and to say “’Sh!” and “Who’s that?” to each other in subdued whispers, and the seniors grasped their sheepskins less nervously and began to realize their importance and the fact that they were no longer undergraduates but full-fledged alumnæ. And with the realization came a curious disagreeable sensation and a queer tightening in the throat, accompanied by a horrible inclination to shed tears over the closed chapter of their lives. Then they fiercely thought how their brothers act under similar circumstances, and wished they were men and could give the class yell and drink champagne to stifle their feelings. That being impossible they tasted a very mild decoction of coffee and turned their troubled eyes to the far end of the room, and wished ardently that the President would get on her feet and say something funny to make them forget that this was the end, the last act of politeness on the part of the faculty to them, that they were being gracefully evicted, as it were, and could never be taken back upon the same terms or under the same conditions. It was the annual Commencement dinner to the retiring senior class, and the senior class was, as usual, feeling collapsed and blank after the excitement of Commencement week and the discovery that they were B.A.’s or B.S.’s, and that the world was before them and there would be no more faculties to set them going or haul them up, but that they would have to depend on their own faculties in the future. There was the annual foregathering of brilliant men and women whose presence was to be an incentive to the newly fledged alumnæ, and the display of whose wit and wisdom in after-dinner speeches was to be a last forcible impression of intellectual vigor and acquirements left on their minds. Suddenly the President arose. She stood there, graceful, perfectly at ease, waiting for a moment of entire silence. Her sensitive, bloodless face looked more animated than usual, her brown eyes quietly humorous. It was a face eminently characteristic--indicative of the element of popularity and adaptability in her nature that made her, just then, so valuable to the college. When she spoke her voice carried a surprising distance, notwithstanding its veiled, soft quality, so that those farthest from her were able to catch and enjoy the witty, gnomic, sarcastic manner of her speech.