Upon all alike--upon him who has watched for it, dreading it through four enchanted years, as upon him who has forgotten until the list of candidates for graduation glared at him from the registrar's bulletin-board with a vacancy in that section where his name ought to be; upon him who has hoped for this as a commencement in very truth of things great and new, as upon him who cares not--shines this early sunlight of the last Wednesday in May. There is never a cloud in the sky this morning; the meadow lark sings more joyously than on any other day; the campus is more radiantly beautiful, because some hundred and fifty people are looking at it through tears for the last time. * * * * * On his own Commencement Day, Tom Ashley lay sleeping, hidden away from the splendor of the morning, two-score miles from the smiling campus. The man lying next him in the upper tier but one rolled over and shook him by the shoulder: "Wake up, Tom; it's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?" The Senior struggled back from sleep; a dream influence lingered with him, a vision of a cloistered enclosure, a dream in which all his senses, now assailed by the sights and smells and sounds of a troop-ship, drew in again the familiar things; he beheld the red tiles a-shimmer above the yellow stone; the aromatic scent of budding eucalyptus was in his nostrils, the sound of the young laughter of women in his ears. He sat up, gazing uncertainly at the dark, crowded space, the narrow stairway, the great iron racks covered with gray-blanketed shapes; then he crawled into his uniform and out on the ship's deck. The early dawn had set the towers of the city glittering; already the low wharf-sheds along the water-front were astir with life. Back of the town the twin peaks, named by the early Franciscans for a woman's breasts, rose veiled with a filmy scarf of fog. Everywhere below them spangled flags in myriads flapped from the tops of the city and among the crowded shipping. Ashley leaned over the rail of the _Peking_ and watched the yellow tide slide by with its burden of debris. Not far away in the stream lay the other two transports, unattended; it was too early for the fussy craft that curtseyed about them during the day. At three o'clock that afternoon these vessels were to sail for the distant Philippines, bearing arms against the ancient country of the Spanish Fathers--the pioneers who had shown the Saxon the way to this golden coast and had made vine and rose flourish for him on the barren sandhills, that he might now strip from the land of their forefathers the last possession of a dying empire. By the strange turnings of history, from the very city of their patron saint the New World was sending forth its first hostile expedition against the Old, and the great community that had grown from their nestling mission of Dolores would shriek Godspeed to these enemies of Old Spain.