fifteen feet from the ground with a wide band of
flowers.

Mrs. Pasmer and her friends found themselves so late that if some
gentlemen who knew Professor Saintsbury had not given up their places
they could have got no seats. But this happened, and the three ladies
had harmoniously blended their hues with those of the others in that
bank of bloom, and the gentlemen had somehow made away with their
obstructiveness in different crouching and stooping postures at their
feet, when the Junior Class filed into the green enclosure amidst the
'rahs of their friends; and sank in long ranks on the grass beside the
chapel. Then the Sophomores appeared, and were received with cheers
by the Juniors, with whom they joined, as soon as they were placed, in
heaping ignominy upon the freshmen. The Seniors came last, grotesque in
the variety of their old clothes, and a fierce uproar of 'rahs and
yells met them from the students squatted upon the grass as they loosely
grouped themselves in front of the Tree; the men of the younger classes
formed in three rings, and began circling in different directions around
them.

Mrs. Pasmer bent across Mrs. Saintsbury to her daughter: "Can you make
out Mr. Mavering among them, Alice?"

"No. Hush, mamma!" pleaded the girl.

With the subsidence of the tumult in the other classes, the Seniors had
broken from the stoical silence they kept through it, and were now
with an equally serious clamour applauding the first of a long list
of personages, beginning with the President, and ranging through their
favourites in the Faculty down to Billy the Postman. The leader who
invited them to this expression of good feeling exacted the full tale of
nine cheers for each person he named, and before he reached the last the
'rahs came in gasps from their dry throats.

In the midst of the tumult the marshal flung his hat at the elm; then
the rush upon the tree took place, and the scramble for the flowers. The
first who swarmed up the trunk were promptly plucked down by the legs
and flung upon the ground, as if to form a base there for the operations
of the rest; who surged and built themselves up around the elm in an
irregular mass. From time to time some one appeared clambering over
heads and shoulders to make a desperate lunge and snatch at the flowers,
and then fall back into the fluctuant heap again. Yells, cries, and
clappings of hands came from the other students, and the spectators in
the seats, involuntarily