After one has been out of college long enough to reckon time by a calendar, instead of by the college catalogue, May and June are sprightly preludes to all one’s operas unsung. But when the year counts nine months, instead of twelve, spring is a climax. At Harvard, it comes in a misty veil of young elm leaves and apple blossoms that floats, for a time, with the sweetest deception in the world, between you and every other disagreeable fact. It envelops you, permeates you, seduces you, and makes you drunk; yet, as hour after hour (and lecture after lecture) drifts past your open window, or your canoe, or the sun-flecked lawn under the trees in the Yard, where you lie and watch the industrious robins rip elastic angle-worms from the sod, you believe that you have awakened for the first time,--that the problem has at last solved itself. You are as blind as a poet, and you laugh and wonder why you never saw before. Had not the only verse been written, you would write it: “Come ... sit by my side and let the world slip; we shall ne’er be younger.” But in spite of all this, these first spring days, that incline one to look upon the immoral sense as a sort of hibernating beast, are not beginnings but the end. A feeling as of many things happening at once comes over you. There is much to do, and no time whatever in which to do it. The College is in a hurry. It crashes along toward the Finals and Class Day, carrying you with it in spite of you. No single activity in which you may engage seems in itself of utmost importance. But the sum total crowds your days and nights with the interests of rowing and base-ball, and the First Ten, and the perennial squabbles of the three clubs in their efforts to pledge the most attractive of the neophytes to join their respective institutions (which, unless the neophytes are very sensible young men, doesn’t tend to make them any more attractive), and the great Spring Dinners, when the graduates come back and meet all the new men and sing songs and drink drinks (or is it the other way?), and forget that they have ever been away from Harvard at all, and the dinners of the college papers,--“The Monthly” (roistering blades), at some modest tavern; and “The Advocate,” at Marliave’s, perhaps, with nothing in particular to eat, but with all that easy indifference to the fragility of crockery by which the artistic temperament makes itself heard; “The Crimson” (typographical remonstrance), enjoying itself somewhere in its strange, reproachful way; and the “Only Successful,” “The Lampoon,” at The Empire or The Tuileries, laughing all night regardless of expense. Then there is Strawberry Night at the Signet, when the First Seven, from the Sophomore Class is taken in,--Haydock and Ellis were on the First Seven,--and the O. K. dinner (Hush-h-h-h-h!), when the First Eight from the Junior Class is initiated, and Strawberry Night at the Pudding, and the “Pop” Concerts, and Riverside, and a thousand other delightful happenings.