That year in the life of Mary Christmas which so stupendously marked the advent of the pushcart and the red hat marked in the lives of Mary and Cynthia Wescott their graduation from the academy. Orgetorix, chief of the Helvetians, and the wholly infamous Catiline had given place to Æneas, his aged father Anchises, and his little son Ascanius, and Cyrus the Younger with his ten thousand Greeks had marched both up and down, moving on at last to make way for Achilles, sulking in his tent. Reciting their carefully prepared essays in the church to the village at large, the one on “Clara Barton, Her Life and Work,” the other a clarion call to achievement, entitled “_Trans Alpes Italia Est_,” they were not in the least unaware that their white graduation frocks eclipsed all the others by reason of the yards of lace which embraced their shoulders in a kind of bertha, and which from waist to hem encircled their wide skirts. Mary Christmas, with the help of little Mary, had woven that lace through the long winter evenings in Portland, and had sent it as a forerunner of her own arrival. When she came, pushing the red cart down the hill, and again drawing the anxious attention of the Wescotts by the deepening lines in her face, the graduation was a thing of the past, and the hearts of Mary and Cynthia were beating excitedly at the thought of college in the fall. But it was not only the thought of college which was quickening the heart of Mary Wescott in those early days of her nineteenth year; and this Mary Christmas discovered on the late afternoon of the day when she said good-bye to John and set forth along the familiar road. Reaching the bars which heretofore had given her access to the short cut through the pasture, she stopped, realizing for the second time that day that a pushcart has its disadvantages. But desiring a drink from the spring that bubbled up at the foot of the boulder, and a glimpse of the freshness of the woods before she must again take to the dusty highway, she drew the red cart to the side of the road, carefully lifted her new skirt to escape the roughness of the gray fence-poles, and crawled between the bars. A few steps through the alders and over the moist green hummocks, starred here and there with the blue of violets, and she emerged into the path that led to the boulder and the spring. She did not drink from the spring, however, thirsty though she was, nor was she conscious of the freshness of the woods with their sun-flecked shadows; for there on the boulder above her, and facing the vista that afforded a sight of the crab-apple tree, sat Mary Wescott with her bright head resting against the dark shoulder of William Howe--the selfsame William who had once played the part of Mary’s father in the Etchmiadzin miracle, and who had but just returned triumphant after a year with the Alma Mater of Mr. Longfellow and Father Wescott.