"Old Grads" were being welcomed back by _Alma Mater_, grateful to her for having helped make life rich, and sweet, and worth living. They hoped to place under her care their children and their children's children, whom they had brought there to give them a foretaste of joys to come. It was a wonderful experience for the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin to meet them. They were fêted and feasted; they wore class and college colors, and entered into the spirit of it all as if they, too, had been the children of Grinnell College. Among the graduates they met editors, lawyers and doctors who had come back from the great cities; professors who had won academic renown, and are serving the great universities; teachers who had carried into the public schools the spirit of their college; preachers who have gained prominence, and those who minister in humble places, faithful in their obscurity and proud of their chance to serve. There were missionaries who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers of education, places of healing and temples of hope. They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their class; to historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed; to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular class got back of it. On Commencement day they watched the dignified President conferring the degrees of Bachelor, Master and Doctor. At noon they attended the college banquet and suffered through the after dinner speeches. That night on the crowded campus they enjoyed the Glee Club's joyful songs, and then, worn to the last shred of their highly emotional natures, walked home with us while the last strains of the Alumni Song faded away into the night. The Herr Director talked until after midnight, telling of the many things which pleased him. The religious dignity, the fine simplicity, the natural, sweet, pure relationship between men and women; but above all else, the democratic spirit from which these other things emanate. He had an apt way of singing snatches of German song of which he seemed to command an unlimited supply; and as he mounted the stairs to his room he sang: "_Ach, wenn es nur immer so bliebe._" (Oh, if it would only remain so always.) Then followed the sad note which is the major one of the German lyric: "_Es war zu schön gewesen, es hatt nich sollen sein._" (It was too beautiful and therefore could not be.) I knew it might not remain so beautiful always; but if life is worth while at all, it is worth while struggling to keep it so.