istles to clover."

The spirited hostess of Norumbega, a bright-eyed little grandmother
immensely proud of that distinction, sat opposite the presiding Dryad,
and beside my mother was her Mount Holyoke classmate of the heroic days
of Mary Lyon, our gentle Librarian Emeritus, so modest from her long
maidenhood that she was distressed at the infant art of aviation,
fearing that one could no longer brush one's hair in a dressing-sacque
free from the peril of a man swooping down from the clouds to peep in
at the window.

It is but a few years since that hour of

"Laurels and laughter and light,"

yet all those smiling elder faces, and not those only, have vanished
away.

Sigurd had his part in that fairest of our festivities, for an
impressionistic picture of him shines from the stanza that the Dryad
addressed to Joy-of-Life:

"This lady is always attended
By a golden and comet-y trail
Of light, speed, sound, fury all blended.
This lady is always attended
By a beautiful vision and splendid,
A flaunting and triumphing tail.
This lady is always attended
By a golden and comet-y trail."

A saucier dinner-card was mine:

"You see her start out all agog
For chapel, pursued by her dog.
You may think her a saint,
But he thinks she ain't,
When she sets him to guarding a frog."

A dagger affixed to this effusion called attention to a learned note:

"This is a scientific error: the beast should be _Bufo Lentiginosus_
not _Rana catesbiana_. Such errors are common in the best poetry."

As successive sorrows cast their shadows on our hearts, as the mothers
slipped away, as the Dryad was smitten down in her brightness, a star
fallen from midsummer sky, Sigurd proved himself a very comforter. The
sympathetic droop of his ears and decorum of his disconsolate brown
eyes in the first hush of mourning and, in the later loneliness, his
nuzzling head against the knee, touches of a pleading tongue on hand
and cheek, his insistence on an answering smile, a pat, a romp, his
conviction that, while sun and wind made holiday and the wood was full
of sticks to throw for Sigurd, it was natural to be glad, helped us
better than more formal consolations. Both solitude and society, both
ignorance and wisdom, he could press close to the hurt without
intrusion. Often when one or the other of us, forgetful of the work
upon the desk, had let the cloud creep over, Sigur