SUNDAY morning dawned bright and clear and cool over South Hadley, and a first Sunday like this means a great deal to the Freshmen. After a 7.30 breakfast, Elinor Haskell, with Edith and one or two other upperclassmen, took the Freshmen living opposite them for their first view of college from the top of Prospect Hill. Prospect Hill, officially known as "Goodnow Park," is part of the two hundred-odd acres of college property on which the village tax assessors look regretfully. Over Nonotuck Lake it rises, casting its image upon it, and mingling its green with the fleecy, white clouds mirrored there. The hand of Nature, aided by the horticulture department, went to make the little hill a wilderness of glory and color, with myriad shades of green from larch, poplar, and pine, and myriad shades of the livelier reds and yellows later in the fall.
Up this beautiful piece of Nature they climbed, chatting in exhilaration as they breathed the dew-laden air, exclaiming at every turn of the path, till they reached the magic viewpoint. There, through a wide opening in the larches, spread the panorama before them.
Below, across the patch of lake not hidden by the larches, spread the college. There the south campus with its large residence halls around the grassy quadrangle, the bright brick set off against the green sward, with lines of white smoke rising up from the kitchen chimneys. There, too, stood the gymnasium, in which Helen hoped in the future to wage many a basket-ball battle; and there, in the eye of it all, the long, needlelike chimney of the power house, the building almost hugging the lake shore. Of the north campus, nothing much could be seen; only the green beauty of the grove where rests the body of the founder, Mary Lyon, and the sloping quadrangle below set off by trees, double-rowed, forming cathedral arches. Above rose Mary Lyon tower, with the clock showing the hour. Farther toward the right, the dark turrets and gables of Williston and the kitchenlike chimneys of the chemistry laboratories on Shattuck; a bare glimpse of Dwight and the new library. While far and beyond in the clear west, spread the Mount Tom range, where, in the glad openness of the place, the cloud shadows moved from crest to crest.
"Up here, girls," announced Miss Haskell, turning away, "is the 'Pepper Box.' It is officially known as the 'pavilion' and designed by the college authorities for observation purposes only."
"But," continued Edith, breaking in, "the girls use it for more agreeable purposes; it's called 'Pepper Box' from its shape--but for obvious reasons, we girls call it the 'spoonholder.'"
The usual and expected laugh followed this explanation, which never seems to grow stale with years.
"Not that you Freshmen are supposed to take advantage of its hospitality," Edith hastened to add. "For no Freshmen are allowed inside it without a Sophomore to chaperon them, between the hours 6.30 A.M. and 10 P.M. Oh, yes; you will find it in your Student League rules. What's that, Miss Thompson?"
"It says you are not supposed to receive 'friends' on Sunday."
"Friends! " exclaimed the other, horrified hands upraised. "Why, child, you're in your swaddling clothes yet!"
"Oh, well, then I suppose you are in your kilts."
This neat little sally turned the laugh on Edith, and Miss Haskell, looking at her fondly, remarked:
"Oh, Edith is going to have a 'man' here Wednesday."
"Sh-sh!"
"Well, Freshmen," bantered Helen, "we shall have to come up here Wednesday and admire the view."
And now the party separated over the little hillside, finding all sorts of cozy nooks and corners, and going out to the natural amphitheaters, where the Seniors give their Shakespeare plays at Commencement, and Elizabethan players perform on May Day. Over yonder, soft under foot, lay the pine needles of years in miniature forests, and emerging from these again, there in the open, a few black-eyed Susans from the tall grass looked up to the sun. A crow or two caw-cawed overhead and made for some belated cornfield. It was a glorious day. Helen and Fanny stood arm in arm and looked silently over the campus. "Is it all you expected it to be, dear?" asked Fanny at last.
"Every bit--and more," breathed Helen. "It's perfectly glorious!"
And then another silence; for the grandeur of the day was in the souls of both.
"Well," said Fanny at length, "I suppose we must go down now. The clock says twenty minutes of ten, and we shall barely have time to dress for church."
"Church! Why, I'm not going."
"Not going! Why, you must!"
"But I can't. I have forty thousand letters to write to people. And what does it matter? I never go at home."
"You don't? Well, when you're at home," said Fanny hotly, "you can be as much of a heathen as you like. Your people are responsible for you there. But here you will have to be as much of a Christian as you can. No, no! No use of talking to me! My father brought me up to think of God occasionally, to make up for the many times God thinks of me. I believe in it, and I want everybody else to do the same. Charity begins at home, and you simply have got to do what I say. You're going to church and you're going to class prayer meeting -- which I am to lead, by the way -- and to-night you are going to the Y. W. C. A. Nan Clark is coming for us."
There was a thunder cloud gathering over Helen's brows at the unexpected attack from the solemn and usually quiet Fanny, and she looked angry and self-assertive for a moment. But Fanny's heat cooled off as Helen's rose, and she laughed and ran her hands softly over her roommate's face.
"There, there; don't be angry with me. You will go, won't you -- Tommy? Besides, you know church is League rules, and then I want you to go to prayer meeting just to please me."
Helen pouted and Fanny kissed the pout.
"You schemer!" muttered the injured one. "I didn't know you could be so ferocious. Hurry on down, if we're going. It's nearly ten now and we'll have to simply throw things on us."
It was just a calm, sweet, Holyoke Sunday, with nothing to do but go to church and write letters; and, if one hadn't sufficient grace to think soul thoughts for herself, they would be interpreted for her at the meetings. And so the girls joined the line of brightly gowned and hatted young women along College Street headed for the village church. For this was in the days when the students still went to the town for Sunday service and listened to the sermons of rural preachers. Now they have church service in the chapel, under visiting clergymen, bishops, and college presidents. But Helen went where Fanny took her that day, without a murmur, and sang more hymns than she ever sang before in all her life.
But, oh, those letters! She tried to write them in the afternoon, and sandwiched them in between visitors. For this was Freshman Sunday, and all the upperclassmen were out visiting the newcomers. The two roommates had callers galore, who brought with them memorable traditions of olden days. They told tales of the great fire of '96 which burned nearly all that could be called college -- tales they themselves had heard from their ancestors; of how this girl had saved her precious tea china by making a bundle of it in her couch cover and throwing it out of the window; of how another rescued her beautiful couch cushions, the pride of her heart, by flinging them out likewise and landing them in the fountain beneath. They told of how the great building burned down slowly and helplessly and pathetically, and how the girls lived crowded up in the village afterwards, for some days wearing clothes lent them by kind-hearted people, and making the best of it. Oh, yes, the college had grown after that like crops over a burn. It was just exactly such a Freshman Sunday that it happened, and the Faculty, they said, always held their breath until the day was over.
And many other yarns were spun the wondering Freshmen, which they might believe or not, as they pleased. Gail Calder, she, the much revered president of the Y. W. C. A., who loved a joke, even took them across the road back of Pearsons, and, Sunday as it was, walked them over to the "button field." They first struck across to the schoolhouse, through neck-high bushes of goldenrod; then toward the west, falling among patches of stickers and beggars' lice -- where every step they had to halt and pick off the exasperating little burrs.
"You see, you wouldn't believe what I told you," said Gail, sinking over her shoe in the sand. "Here is where the buttons grow in the summer; nobody ever sees them growing, because all the girls are on their vacations. But Byron Smith -- the grand old friend of the college -- he will vouch for my statements."
Sure enough, there in between the bits of stubble in the sandy ground were scattered buttons of all kinds and sizes. The girls picked some up and examined them.
"Oh, yes!" remarked Gail. "They're sure enough buttons. I am not mesmerizing you."
"But how do you suppose they got here?" asked Helen incredulously.
"Got here? Didn't I say they grew here! If they didn't grow, how did they get here? There's the rub."
" Perhaps girls lost them here," volunteered Fanny.
"These are not all girls' buttons," argued Helen, jingling a handful.
Gail was laughing at their seriousness.
"Those who don't believe they grew here say they were brought here by the washerwomen after they'd rubbed them off our clothes on the washboard. Others say they came from Pearl City, where the factories are, on the back of a glacier during the Ice Age. Still others assert that they were washed down from the old Colonial graveyard that used to be alongside of Pearsons, where the little village library now stands. You know I'm a history fiend, and used to practice historical research there."
"In a graveyard!"
" Yes, indeed; and we all held that it was the most valuable possession of this little hamlet; but the 'progressive' and misguided population could not be brought to see the historic value of two-hundred-year old graves with their odd tombstones."
"Did there really use to be a graveyard there?"
"What became of it?"
"It moved."
"Moved?"
"Oh, they dug it up, the library being a pretext, and carried it to the new, 'tasty and cheerful' cemetery, as the pastor calls it."
"Not really!"
"Yes, really! I saw them digging up the bones. And, girls, do you know -- the people over in Pearsons Hall could look out of their windows at night and see white, sheeted things walking around! We used to send Freshmen down here nights to --"
"Oh-h-h! Don't! Ugh! It makes me creepy!" cried the girls.
"Of course we did!"
"And are the -- the remains at the new cemetery now?"
"Yes, but some of the bones have been badly mixed up; so now when relatives go there to pray for their ancestors, they don't know whether they are kneeling over the bones of Josiah Bassett, the Revolutionary captain, or Hepzebah, the second wife of Hezekiah Granby."
"Oh, how gruesome!"
"Oh, Miss Calder, I never thought you could be so irreverent!"
Gail laughed and, to tell the truth, felt a trifle guilty.
"Well," she said, "it really happened, though it may be nothing to laugh at. As for the button field, you can take any of the theories suggested to you, or invent some for yourself. As for me, of course, the buttons grew here."
And even to this day, as before it, the button field is the mystery of all Freshmen and others. You can go and see it for yourself.
Helen and Fanny and the rest took to Gail as to their native element. In fact, they didn't know which they liked better -- Gail or Elinor. Next to the word "flunk," there are two words which college girls learn to know as soon as they step foot over the threshold, and those two words are "squelch" and "crush." "Squelch," that bugbear to sensitive people, Helen in special knew. But "crush" comes in a pleasanter, though more dangerous, state of being. Now the girls were torn with conflicting emotions: Gail's sweetness and beauty of nature, her soft, winning voice, offset by her unbelievable wit and love of fun-poking, captured them; Elinor's confident and masterful grace carried them away. But to-day saw another stellar light rise on their horizon; and Helen, at least, was lost in the worship of the new deity.
It was late in the afternoon, and they had all gone to the campus sing on Williston steps. The Seniors own the steps during the final year, and are alone entitled to sit thereon. Woe betide the underclassman who dares sit there even for a moment! And on this Freshman Sunday, on the first of a series of sings till the cool fall should set in, the Seniors were sitting on the steps as a class, leading the rest of the college in singing favorite hymns, proud of their distinction and much admired of the crowds of friends on the green lawns around them. During one of the hymns Helen poked Fanny's arm.
"Who is that little girl -- that little dark girl next to Miss Haskell -- on this side?"
"I don't know," said Fanny, looking off her hymn book. "That girl with the soft, curly hair?"
"Helen Crosby," whispered Molly Walsh. "She's great!"
Helen did not take her eyes off her new-found star. She sang the hymns, groping listlessly for the words after Fanny, but that "sing" was an inspiration for her as nothing else had been. For Helen had a bad "crush"!
She awoke to herself as the Seniors got up to sing that beautiful college song, "Oh, Holyoke, when upon thy campus," then just adopted by the college; they closed with " Gray shadows are stealing," which, with the good-night twitter of birds getting ready for bed, had an infinite charm of its own.
"I wish I knew where she lives," quoth Helen.
Helen felt herself quite virtuous that Sunday; for, as she announced to Fanny as they were getting ready to go to bed that night:
"I have been at four pious meetings to-day -- count them, four" -- telling them on her fingers: "church, Freshman prayer meeting, Y. W. C. A. to-night, and the sing. Ah, that sing! I wonder," she added, turning her pretty white shoulders to the glass, "if wings aren't beginning to sprout! Fanny, dear, you'll soon have a full-fledged angel soul in me."