shes and terror-smitten halts, came within a few
yards of him, sat up with quivering nose and eyes alight with fearful
imaginings--vanished, a flash of fluffy brown and white. Shadows grew
longer; the brier pipe sputtered feebly in depletion and was refilled. A
cricket chirped and heard answer; there was a woodland stir of breezes;
and the pair of robins left the branches overhead in eager flight,
vacating before the arrival of a great flock of blackbirds hastening
thither ere the eventide should be upon them. The blackbirds came,
chattered, gossiped, quarrelled, and beat each other with their wings
above the smoker sitting on the top fence rail.

But he had remembered--it was Commencement. To-day, a thousand miles to
the east, a company of grave young gentlemen sat in semi-circular rows
before a central altar, while above them rose many tiers of mothers and
sisters and sweethearts, listening to the final word. He could see it
all very clearly: the lines of freshly shaven, boyish faces, the dainty
gowns, the flowers and bright eyes above, and the light that filtered
in through stained glass to fall softly over them all, with, here and
there, a vivid splash of color, Gothic shaped. He could see the throngs
of white-clad loungers under the elms without, under-classmen, bored by
the Latin addresses and escaped to the sward and breeze of the campus;
there were the troops of roistering graduates trotting about arm in arm,
and singing; he heard the mandolins on the little balconies play an old
refrain and the university cheering afterward; saw the old professor he
had cared for most of all, with the thin white hair straggling over his
silken hood, following the band in the sparse ranks of his class. And he
saw his own Commencement Day--and the station at the junction where he
stood the morning after, looking across the valley at the old towers
for the last time; saw the broken groups of his class, standing upon the
platform on the other side of the tracks, waiting for the south-bound
train as he and others waited for the north-bound--and they all sang
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot;" and, while they looked across at
each other, singing, the shining rails between them wavered and blurred
as the engine rushed in and separated them and their lives thenceforth.
He filled his pipe again and spoke to the phantoms gliding over the
dust--"Seven years!" He was occupied with the realization that there had
been a man in his class wh