And what a song it is! All the bloom of his beautiful islands sheds its fragrance there. The hum of his honey-bees roving through beds of spices, the loveliness of dark-eyed maidens treading the wine-press with ruddy feet, the laughter of young boys swinging in the vines and stained with the scented grapes,--all the music that rings through his orange-groves, all the sunshine of the tropics caught in the glow of fruit and flower, in the blue of sky and sea, in the blinding whiteness of the shore and the amethystine evening,--all come quivering over the western wave in the falls of his tuneful voice. You shall hear it while the day is yet dark in the folds of the morning twilight,--a weak, faint, preliminary "whoo! whoo!" uncertain and tentative, then a trill or two of awakened assurance, and then, with a confident, courageous gush and glory of soul, he flings aside all minor considerations, and dashes con amore into the very middle of things. I am not musical, and cannot give you his notes in technical hieroglyphs, but in exact and intelligible lines such as all may understand, whether musical or not, his song is like this,--and you may rely upon its accuracy, for I wrote it down from his own lips this morning:-- /_`'`______ ....... ^^------^^^ ^^\\^^^-------- / / / ---- ||| ----^^_^/ ^^^ ///\\\ ^^ SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY It happened to me once to "assist" at the celebration of Class-Day at Harvard University. Class-Day is the peculiar institution of the Senior Class, and marks its completion of College study and lease from College rules. Harvard has set up her Lares and Penates in a fine old grove, or a fine old grove and green have sprouted up around her, as the case may be,--most probably the latter, if one may judge from the appearance of the buildings which constitute the homes of the students, and which seem to have been built, and to be now sustained, without the remotest reference to taste or influence, but solely to furnish shelter,--angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky, and worse within than without. Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, why is it that a boys' school should be placed beyond the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life, that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity? Have boys so strong a predisposition to grace, that society can afford to take them away from home and its influences, and turn them loose with dozens of other boys into a bare and battered boarding-house, with its woodwork dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy and dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything narrow and rickety, unhomelike and unattractive?