Nothing of this was in Ashley's mind as he watched the water lapping at the beach-side of the transports. He kept saying over in his mind the words of his bunk-mate, "It's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?" In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Tom, looking at his coarse blue uniform, smiled as he thought on his plans for Graduation Week. Those feet, now clad in new government gunboats, were to have waltzed but two nights before in shining patent-leather at the head of the Senior Ball. Only yesterday he should have been galloping around the bases in fantastic costume at the Senior-Faculty game. Monday afternoon, when he should have been before the Chapel site with Her, listening to the glories of the Class as told over its freshly-mortared plate, he was tramping on the wrenching cobble-stones of Market Street with a bunch of roses in his campaign hat and another in his gun barrel, and the city going mad on the curbing. Lord High Ruler of the Senior dance and counsellor in all the affairs of the Class, he was cooped up with a thousand others on the troopship _City of Peking_, a sergeant at eighteen a month and lucky to get so much, with a chain of superiors ordering his comings and goings. All this because of the destruction of an American battleship in the harbor of Havana. The notes of a bugle-call drifted across the water from the nearest transport, and Tom's mind went back to the time when the unfamiliar sound was first heard on the Stanford campus. It seemed like a very old memory, although it was but three weeks past. He remembered how, when the recruiting sergeant came down from the city, the after-dinner crowd used to sit on the Hall steps watching him drill the men in the moonlight. After drill, they would loaf in his Hall room, talking it over, and when the civilians had drifted off to bed or to the inglorious studies of a routine now ended for Tom, he would sit with "Nosey" Marion and blow smoke. Neither spoke much, only a word now and then, but they were thinking of the same thing.