"Lose!" his friend shouted,--"lose! They're gaining every stroke! Rah! rah! rah! Harvard! Harvard! Harvard! There they go across the line!" He threw his arms deliriously around Cosden and Hamlen and they performed a war-dance on the unsubstantial seats. Every Harvard sympathizer on the train had gone mad, and the Yale streamers were buried in the avalanche of crimson flags. "Another one!" Huntington shouted; "another wreath for the Alma Mater, Hamlen! Rah, rah, rah! Harvard!" Hamlen had caught the contagion and was as affected with delirium as those around him. He shouted his college yell over and over again, unconscious that it was the first time in his life he had ever done so. Huntington, the sedate Huntington, was cavorting like a two-year-old, yet Hamlen saw nothing incongruous in his conduct. Cosden was so hoarse that his cries resembled a wheezy calliope, yet they were sweet music in Hamlen's ears. Harvard had won, Philip had won, he had won! At the station a crowd of undergraduates were singing hilariously: "_Bring the bacon home, John, We cannot eat it all. We sometimes got a taste of it When you and I were small. But now you bring it home, John, In springtime and in fall. It seems an awful waste of it, We cannot eat it all._" There was the hectic scramble for seats on the special train. Snatches of other songs came from here and there, and spasmodic cheering; but gradually the excitement settled down into the quieter calm of satisfied accomplishment. It was an orderly crowd which deserted the train at Back Bay, but the men bunched on the platform, before they separated, and again burst into song. The jibes were forgotten, the boastings hushed. These had their place only in the first expressions of exultant victory. A deeper sentiment seized the celebrating host, which was expressed with uncovered heads: "_Fair Harvard! thy sons to thy jubilee throng, And with blessings surrender thee o'er, By these festival rites, from the age which is past To the age which is waiting before._" Hamlen watched them in silence, touched with a new emotion by the sound of the words, familiar enough, but which now took on a different meaning. Huntington was right: it was not a boat-race he had just witnessed, it was not the celebration of a victory over Yale, it was a "festival rite," consecrating anew to its Alma Mater that brotherhood to which he belonged, in grateful acknowledgment of the character and power developed beneath her beneficent influence which placed within its reach "the Earth and all that's in it." * * * * * XXXI * * * * *