a long, long time and grow big like an elm, and we want it
where everybody will see it."

Mr. Durant looked exceedingly surprised, and for the space
of five seconds I was breathless. Then he smiled in the
really fascinating way that he has. "Well," he said, and
looked at me again, "what else have you decided to do?"

Then I told him all about the program we had planned, which
is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be
preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and
a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into
the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be
handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the
spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going to
buy it for the class in the village that afternoon.

"Well, mind you get a good one," he advised. We said we would,
very joyfully. Then he told us we might select any young elm
we wanted, and tie our class colors on it, and he would order
it to be transplanted for us. After that he put on his hat
and all three of us went out and fixed the spot right in front
of the college by the driveway. Mr. Durant himself stuck a
little stick in the exact place where the elm of '81 will wave
its branches for at least a hundred years, I hope.

The hundred years are still to run, and old College Hall has
vanished, but the '81 elm stands in its "prominent" place, a tree
of ancient memories and visions ever young.

It was not until 1889 that the pageant element began to take
a definite and conspicuous place in the Tree Day exercises.
The class of '89 in its senior year gave a masque in which tall
dryads, robed in green, played their dainty roles; and that same
year the freshmen, the class of 1892, gave the first Tree Day
dance: a very mild dance of pink and white English maidens around
a maypole--but the germ of all the Tree Day dances yet unborn.
In its senior year, 1892 celebrated the discovery of America by
a sort of kermess of Colonial and Indian dances with tableaux,
and ever since, from year to year, the wonder has grown; Zeus,
and Venus, and King Arthur have all held court and revel on the
Wellesley Campus. Every year the long procession across the green
grows longer, more beautiful, more elaborate; the dancing is more
exquisitely planned, more complex, more carefully rehearsed. In
the spring, We