It was mid-June before the night of Commencement arrived. The Methodist Church, being the largest suitable edifice of the town, was used for the imposing occasion. The lower grades of the high school and friends of the graduates, as well as the alumni of preceding years, had all combined in decorating the building for the Commencement exercises. The big swinging chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were wreathed in greenery accentuated with flowers. The edge of the pulpit platform was outlined with gaily blooming plants. The space intervening between that and the altar railing was filled with showy plants in tubs and buckets, one end finishing with a white oleander in a mass of snowy bloom, the other exactly like it except that the flowers were peach-blow pink. The pulpit had been removed. Back of the chairs for the graduating class there was a second row for the principal, the teachers of the schools, the School Board, and several ministers, and lining the wall, a small forest of gay leaves and bright flowers. Every window was filled with the lovely roses of June, with flowering almond, japonica, iris, and gay streamers of striped grass. It was the custom to hold the graduating exercises in the church, then to repair to Newberry’s Hotel for a supper which was the last word in culinary effort on the part of the owners, helped out by table decorations provided by the alumni and the lower classes of the high school. The long tables for the graduates and their parents, for the singers and speakers, were lovely. They were laid with linen that was truly snowy, with silver provided by several of the wealthiest families of the town, with china that came from the same cabinets as the silver; and these tables were made beautiful beyond words with great bowls of yellow, white, and purple wild violets, starry campion, anemones, maidenhair fern, and every exquisite wilding that knew June in the Central States. After the banquet, the class and its guests took up the line of march across the street and in the upstairs of the big building known as Franklin’s Opera House, they danced until morning. Commencement was the one great social affair known to Ashwater. Nothing else in the history of the town called forth such an audience. It was the one occasion upon which the church people forgot that the lure of the dance would imperil the souls of their young. They went and drank lemonade and fanned themselves as they sat in double rows of chairs lining the walls, many of them joining the dance to the mellow notes of a harp brought all the way from Indianapolis.