years ago the crowd at Commencement filled the town green and streets, and
the meeting-house in which the graduating class were the heroes of the
hour. The valedictorian, the salutatorian, the philosophical orator, walked
on air, and the halo of after-triumphs of many kinds was not brighter or
more intoxicating than the brief glory of the moment on which they took the
graduating stage, under the beaming eyes of maiden beauty and the profound
admiration of college comrades.

Willis, as Phil Slingsby, has told the story of that college life fifty and
sixty years ago. The collegian danced and drove and flirted and dined and
sang the night away. Robert Tomes echoed the strain in his tale of college
life a little later, under stricter social and ecclesiastical conditions.
There was a more serious vein also. In 1827 the Kappa Alpha Society was the
first of the younger brood of the Greek alphabet--descendants of the Phi
Beta Kappa of 1781--and in 1832 Father Eells, as he is affectionately
called, founded Alpha Delta Phi, a brotherhood based upon other aims and
sympathies than those of Mr. Philip Slingsby, but one which appealed
instantly to clever men in college, and has not ceased to attract them to
this happy hour, as the Easy Chair has just now commemorated.

But neither in the sketches of Slingsby nor in the memories of those
Commencement triumphs is there any record of an absorbing and universal
and overpowering enthusiasm such as attends the modern college boat-race.
The race of this year between the two great New England universities,
Harvard and Yale--the Crimson and the Blue--was a twilight contest, for
"high-water," says the careful chronicler, "did not occur until seven
o'clock." At half-past six he describes the coming of the grand armada and
the expectant scene in these words: "The _Block Island_ came down from
Norwich with every square foot of her three decks occupied, the _Elm
City_ brought a mass of Yale sympathizers from New Haven, and the