"The next girl I get engaged to," sighed Greg, "I'm going to insist
on marrying instantly. Then there'll be no danger of losing her."

At the dock, Anstey, Durville, Douglass and other grads. waited,
though the majority of the members of the late first class were
already speeding to New York on a train that had started a few
minutes earlier.

"I couldn't bear to go down by train, suh," explained Anstey
in a very low voice. "I want to stand at the stern of the steamer,
and see West Point's landmarks fade and vanish one by one. And
I don't reckon, suh, that I shall want anyone to talk to me while
I'm looking back from the stern of the boat."

"Same here," observed Greg, with what was, for him, a considerable
display of feeling.

Then the boat swept in, and the West Point party went silently
aboard. All made their way to the stern on the saloon deck.

That evening the class was to meet, for the last time as a whole,
at one of the theaters in New York. And the late cadets would
sit together, solidly, as a class.

Friends of graduates who wished would attend the theater, though
in seats away from the class.

Dick and Greg's relatives and friends were all to attend. More,
they were to stop at the same hotel. The next forenoon the ladies
would attend to some shopping. Then the reunited party would
journey back to Gridley.

A dozen or so West Point graduates stood at the stern of the swift
river steamer. The captain of the craft, a veteran in the river
service, knew something of how these young men just out of the
gray felt. For the first five miles down the river the swift
craft went at half speed. Then, suddenly, full speed ahead was
rung on the engine-room bell, and the craft went on under greatly
increased headway.

"Well, gentlemen," murmured Anstey, moving around and walking
slowly forward, "the United States Military Academy is the grandest
alma mater that a fellow could possibly have. I'm glad to be
through, glad to be away from West Point, but I shall journey
reverently back there any time when I have any leisure in this
bright part of the good old world."

How sweet the joys of the great metropolis! Yet these joys would
have palled had our travelers remained there too long. The following
afternoon they were again journeying toward what is, after all,
the one real spot on earth---home!

Gridley well-nigh went wild over its returning West Pointers---though
now West Pointers no longer.

O