The little, bare room was soon colored with gifts of flowers from friends in my parish, from my classmates in the Seminary, and from the missionary. Letters of consolation and good cheer, visits from the president of the Seminary, who told me not to fret about examinations, because I should graduate, and cheering minutes with my class friends took the edge from my suffering. One morning a delegation of little children came bashfully into the room, and after standing in a row before me, each waiting for the other to speak,--for they represented the children whom I had organized in the mission church, two years before,--one of them, a little girl, stepped forward and with a quick thrust put on my white coverlet a paper bag, saying: “Mr. Priddy, we’re sorry you’re sick and hope you’ll soon be well. We chipped in for those and hope you’ll like ’em, please.” When they had left the room, the nurse opened the bag and discovered one half-dozen maximum-ripened bananas. But graduation! Should I be in the hospital while my classmates enjoyed the festivities, the sobering joys, the inspiration of that event? The doctor, who with his trail of a clinic examined me each morning, had been given a word by the President, for though a stern man in appearance and very blunt in speech, he would turn, half fiercely, in mock ferocity to my nurse and say, “This young man _must_ be ready for the sixth of June. Remember, he is not to be in this place on that day!” Though he never smiled as he said this; yet because he said it I imagined him as the best friend I had ever called friend, for the sixth of June was the day of graduation! From the fragments of news which came to me, day by day, I knew that the Seminary was shaping itself for the graduation exercises. The oral examinations had been held; the visiting alumni had met for their annual meeting; the reception, in one of the professors’ homes, had been given; and on the morrow, in the evening, my classmates would stand before the pulpit in the brick church while the President handed them their diplomas. Graduation morning found me shaved, expectant and nervous, sitting at one of the windows watching a little girl cruelly strip a tiny sapling of its first glorious flowers. Suddenly the nurse came into the room, with a knowing smile, and said that there was a stranger to see me! There followed the scrape of a foot along the rubber-carpeted corridor and into the room, dressed in demure black, came the missionary! She had followed the leading of her heart and had come down to cheer me on for graduation, for a strange dream had come to her the night I had been smitten down, a dream that came before any news of my illness had reached her, in which some spirit of warning had whispered that I was suffering, in danger of my life! Then the mail had brought her the truth, and there she stood before me to share the honors of the day sympathetically with me.