ween the
different dormitories under the drooping elms were thronged with
people coming and going in pairs and groups; and the academic fete, the
prettiest flower of our tough old Puritan stem, had that charm, at
once sylvan and elegant, which enraptures in the pictured fables of the
Renaissance. It falls at that moment of the year when the old university
town, often so commonplace and sometimes so ugly, becomes briefly and
almost pathetically beautiful under the leafage of her hovering elms and
in, the perfume of her syringas, and bathed in this joyful tide of youth
that overflows her heart. She seems fit then to be the home of the poets
who have loved her and sung her, and the regret of any friend of the
humanities who has left her.

"Alice," said Mrs. Pasmer, leaning forward a little to speak to her
daughter, and ignoring a remark of the Professor's, "did you ever see so
many pretty costumes?"

"Never," said the girl, with equal intensity.

"Well, it makes you feel that you have got a country, after all," sighed
Mrs. Pasmer, in a sort of apostrophe to her European self. "You see
splendid dressing abroad, but it's mostly upon old people who ought to
be sick and ashamed of their pomps and vanities. But here it's the young
girls who dress; and how lovely they are! I thought they were charming
in the Gymnasium, but I see you must get them out-of-doors to have the
full effect. Mr. Mavering, are they always so prettily dressed on Class
Day?"

"Well, I'm beginning to feel as if it wouldn't be exactly modest for
me to say so, whatever I think. You'd better ask Mrs. Saintsbury; she
pretends to know all about it."

"No, I'm bound to say they're not," said the Professor's wife candidly.
"Your daughter," she added, in a low tone for all to hear, "decides that
question."

"I'm so glad you said that, Mrs. Saintsbury," said the young man. He
looked at the girl; who blushed with a pleasure that seemed to thrill to
the last fibre of her pretty costume.

She could not say anything, but her mother asked, with an effort at
self-denial: "Do you think so really? It's one of those London things.
They have so much taste there now," she added yielding to her own pride
in the dress.

"Yes; I supposed it must be," said Mrs. Saintsbury, "We used to come in
muslins and tremendous hoops--don't you remember?"

"Did you look like your photographs?" asked young Mavering, over his
shoulder.

"Yes; but we didn't know it then," said the P