hes, gives
periodic entertainments in the "Barn" which go far to promote
general good feeling and social fellowship. The first president
of the Barn Swallows, Mary E. Haskell, '97, says that it arose
as an Everybody's Club, to give buried talents a chance. "Suddenly
we adjured the Trustees by Joy and Democracy to bless our charter,
to be gay once a week, and when they gave the Olympic nod we
begged for the Barn to be gay in--and they gave that too.

"It was a grim joy parlor; rough old floor, bristly with splinters,
few windows, no plank walk, no stage, no partitions, no lighting.
We hung tin reflectored lanterns on a few of the posts,--thicker
near the stage end,--and opened the season with an impromptu
opera of the Brontes'." To Professor Charlotte F. Roberts,
Wellesley '80, the Barn Swallows owe their happy name.

Besides these more formal organizations there are a number of
department clubs, the Deutsche Verein, the Alliance Francaise,
the Philosophy Club, the Economics Club, and informal groups such
as the old Rhymesters' Club, which flourished in the late nineties,
the Scribblers' which seems to have taken its place and enlarged
its scope, the Social Study Circle, the little Socialist Club, and
others through which the students express their intellectual and
social interests.

Of Wellesley's many festivities and playtimes it would take too
long to tell: of her Forensic Burnings, held when the last junior
forensic for the year is due; of her processional serenades, with
Chinese lanterns; of her singing on the chapel steps in the evenings
of May and June. These well-beloved customs have been establishing
themselves year by year more firmly in undergraduate hearts, but
it is not always possible to trace them to their "first time."
Most of them date back to the later years of the nineteenth century,
or the first of the twentieth. Wellesley's musical cheer seems
to have waked the campus echoes first in the spring of 1890, as
a result of a prize offered in November, 1889, although as far
back as 1880 there is mention of a cheer. The musical cheer has
so much beauty and dignity, both near at hand and at a distance,
that many of the early alumnae and the faculty wish it might some
time quite supersede the ugly barking sounds, imitated from the
men's colleges, with which the girls are fain to evince their
approval and celebrate their triumphs. They invariably end their
barking with the musical cheer, however,