d themselves in beautiful obscurity about
his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the city, as it were,
imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity of his evocation to
recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence of human desire and
human vision so supremely displayed through the merely outward glory of
its repository.

All night Michael and a large party of freshmen, now scarcely to be
called freshmen so much did they feel they possessed of the right to
live, had sustained themselves with dressed crab and sleepy
bridge-fours. During the gray hour of hinted dawn they wandered round
the college, rousing from sleep such lazy contemporaries as had vowed
that not all the joys and triumph of May Morning on the tower should
make them keep awake, during the vigil. Even so with what it contained
of ability to vex other people that last hour hung a little heavily upon
the enthusiasts. Slowly, however, the sky lightened: slowly the cold
hues and blushes of the sun's youth, that stood as symbol for so much
here in St. Mary's, made of the east one great shell of lucent color.
The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious outlines of dawn and
sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed vitality. The choir boys gathered like
twittering birds at the base of the tower: energetic visitors came half
shyly through the portal that was to give such a sense of time's
rejuvenation as never before had they deemed possible: dons came
hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light: and at last the
tired revelers, Michael and Wedderburn, Maurice Avery and Lonsdale and
Grainger and Cuffe and Castleton and a score besides equipped in cap and
gown went scrambling and laughing up the winding stairs to the top.

For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was
scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too
poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of
worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys
with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said
to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray
lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires
and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets
it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered
again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the
dons cawed gravely lik