I have never known what it is to be lonely.
Clara Frances Stevens
A hundred years is a short time, but it is plenty long enough for a good many interesting personalities to come and go. They come and go so fleetingly at a college that nobody can keep track of all they add to the wisdom and gaiety of the place. It is only now and then that a word is memorized or a story sent ringing down the 'spaceways' of the generations. When we catch the echo of these, we may be sure that something about them has delighted the sense of wisdom or comedy, together sometimes with the sense of the allegorical or the sheer taste for aptly chosen words.
For example, here is a remark that was long remembered because it was spoken by a woman with a notable gift for well-accented phrase. Doctor Mary C. Lowell of the class of 1885 was the first woman in the United States to be admitted both to the practice of law and the practice of medicine, combining the two professions in one person. Early in her career she spent some time as resident physician at Mount Holyoke.Whenever on a stormy day she saw flocks of students running unprotected from the big building to Williston in the rain, she would call them to heel and send them back to get their rubbers. Alumnae who have grandchildren of their own can still recite the exact words of Doctor Lowell's speech on such occasions:
'Young ladies!' she would say as if addressing the Supreme Bench at the very least, 'Wear your rubbers. If you do not wear your rubbers you will feel it. You may not feel it today. You may not feel it a year from today. But young ladies, you will feel it!'
How instructive it would be to take a census of the surviving non-rubber-wearers of the nineties, and ask them if they 'feel it.' One observes that this bit of medical advice has lost little with the passage of time. It is only that galoshes nowadays are more trig and fashionable than those hateful old rubber gunboats we used to despise to wear.
One needed the, though, if one cared to enjoy in springtime the most decorative allegorical feature of South hadley - the forget-me-nots in the brook. Miss Lydia Shattuck planted those forget-me-nots more than fifty years ago. Who went with her on the planting expedition is uncertain, but it is variously reported that either Mr. Levi Allen or Mr. 'Posy' Bates helped her to set them out. The brooks of South Hadley took so kindly to the Lydia Shattuck forget-me-nots that her little settlement of them spread and seeded themselves in until the swamp near Morgan Road and the marshes beyond the Button Field used to be blue with them. They were so plentiful that at the sophomore senior dance twenty-seven years ago, each senior was given a bouquet of the dainty flowers; and to look at the swamps afterward nobody would have guessed that a single forget-me-not was missing. After all these years of picking, they are still gathered at Commencement time and used to decorate the breakfast-tables for the reunion of the fifty-year class. But to find them now you have to go out of your way, and be careful not to be deceived by 'blue-eyed grass' or 'long-leaved stitchwort.'
If the forget-me-nots ever should 'run out,' as old stock may, somebody in the spirit of Lydia Shattuck should go out to the brook in the ravine beyond the Button Field with a box or two of new plants and dig them in for the next half-century; because the habitat seems to be ideal. Forget-me-nots in gardens often grow up to look seedy and pindling. But the South Hadley forget-me-nots, on account of the tall brook wees and lush water plants close around them, can run up to astonishing heights and still have their panicles of enameled-blue forets as fresh and cool at Commencement time as they were in May. Miss Lydia Shattuck died in 1889, but her forget-me-nots and the yellow lady's-slipper that she planted in the garden still represent her on campus every spring.
She herself almost became a legend. Most beautiful of scientific women in those early days, with her portrait in Shattuck Laboratory still able to make workmen and special delivery boys drop into the office to ask 'who that lady was,' she brought to her classes all the inspiration she had gained as a disciple of Agassiz and student on the Island of Penikese, as well as the spirit she had caught from Mary Lyon. One of her pupils, now a great-grandmother, described her to me not long ago. 'Nobody who ever saw her ever forgot her, and if you once had seen her you were glad all your life that you had. She had a face like an apple blossom and perfect white hair, and when she led the procession on Graduation Day she wore a white lace collar and a purple moire antique gown.' And Dean Florence Purington remembers how, when Miss Shattuck was a very old lady, she was taking some girls for a 'botanizing' walk when they came to a brook. That brook was wide with the spring rains, between two deep banks. The girls looked at it dubiously. 'Now, girls,' said Miss Shattuck, 'I'm going to jump it, and if I can, you can.' So, led by Miss Shattuck, the whole party, with their 'botanizing tins' waving, leaped across.
If Miss Shattuck was the most beautiful, certainly the most amusing early legend at Mount Holyoke was the most amusing early legend at Mount Holyoke was the 'Ghost on Rollers.' This was not a superstitious ghost. It was one of the members of the teaching staff not long after the Civil War. Look up a fashion plate of 1869 or so and notice the bell-shaped skirts - not quite as gong-shaped as the skirts of Mary Todd Lincoln, but still large enough to cover the mechanics of walking. Dressed in one of them, a lady could move about like a thing on casters. Anyone who attended the stage performance of The Barretts of Wimpole Street will remember how Elizabeth Barrett's maid Wilson walked across the stage - completely motionless herself, all but the pattering feet that the audience could not see. At every performance the observers learned to watch for Wilson's entrance to see her do it. The Ghost on Rollers used to glide about that way, not only floating along in one piece, but utterly noiseless as well. Somebody ought to impersonate her at the Centennial.
A tiny eighty-or-more-year-old lady once told me about her remembrance of this ghost. Said she: 'One evening it was my turn to wait on table. I said to the table, "You watch me when I take out the big platter. I'm going to roller out like the Ghost." So when it came time, I rolled out, holding myself perfectly still, running my feet like lightning without ruffling my skirts. Perfectly stiff I was, I made two trips this way, but my table got to laughing and I soon saw that every eye in the dining-room was on me. After that I walked as I should.'
The lady who reported this must have resembled in her student days the girl described in the 1933 Llamarada as 'A very small streak of lightning with bright blue eyes walking on its heels.' She also told me about the 'Spaceway Cat' - another member of the teaching force who won the name because of her manner in the corridors. I asked if she got the name because she was stealthy or because she was of a catty disposition, and the answer was: 'Both! She wanted to know everything that was going on, and she was very quiet about it. Sometimes I got called to the business room and asked why things were thus and so. Whenever anything was found out we always knew it must be the Spaceway Cat. . . . When I came back to New England not very long ago to see my son, I stopped at South Hadley and I saw the trees on the sides of the avenue - and I said to myself, "Well, old lady, you've lived to see these big trees grow up from little bits of trees." And then I saw the girls running around and doing different things, and I said to myself, "Well, girls, you couldn't have done thus and so if you'd been here in my time - but I'm glad you can now."'
As I listened I wished that this same lady could have happened along on the modern campus in the autumn of 1935, when the seniors, after Cap and Gown Day, were being greeted in their new dignity by the freshmen. The freshmen, all day, went about the campus very much like the Ghost on Rollers - half a dozen little stiff running forward steps and then a back-stitch, and repeat. Whenever they met a senior they knelt and sang a humble song, one stanza of which began:
I bow down when you speak
Am silent and hear,
For you are so learned!
And I am So QUEER!'
The total effect was dramatic - two hundred and fifty or so fair creatures skimming over the landscape, with a backward jerk every few steps - all of them intoning the Confession for the Day - probably the last thing a young modern wants to be - the nadir of self-abasement, far worse than 'miserable sinner' - 'I am so queer!'
It made one think of Mary Lyon's imcomparable sentence, 'All ladies cannot be independent enough to be singular.'
Some ladies can, though. From their youth up, Doctor Clapp and Doctor Hooker were not exactly 'singular,' but they certainly were independent. When the first high bicycles came out with tall wheels and lofty seats, they bought two of them and rode them all over the countryside - the astonished townspeople running out to look up at their pleasing eminence as they tooled by. They also bought beehives and set them up along the path to the Plant House; and in those hives they kept many a bee. Then the idea of getting a hen struck Doctor Clapp - not a hen to have and to hold, but just a temporary rented hen to keep long enough so that from its eggs a study of chick embryology might be made. The experiment was successful. A flawless series of specimens showing the various stages before hatching was arranged; and then the idea struck Doctor Clapp of charging students outside the Zoology Department five cents to view the collection. The college flocked, each with a warm nickel in hand - and the gate receipts paid for the rent of the hen. If the exhibition had been free it would not have attracted half the crowd.
Doctor Hooker, never to be outdone, decided to make a serious study of prize hens. From Cook of England she bought Buff Orpington eggs. From these she started her famous Gladstone and Lady Gladstone line. Prize after prize she won for more than twenty years. The Canadian and American judges all knew her hens, for she trained them to pose from their earliest chickenhood, and the moment her birds saw observers admiring, they would take up a correct stance and raise their chins. The family record of the champions versus the culls (which were often bought for a song by farmers and allowed to breed ad lib.) makes a study only second to the record of the Jonathan Edwards family versus the Jukes. The heredity chart included the prize birds Gladstone, Pertelote, Salisbury, Connault, Aureus, Margaret, and Henrietta, down to the three prize pullets Felicity, Patience, and Serenity, may now be seen in a glass case near the entrance to Clapp Laboratory, where stands an elegantly mounted specimen of one of these prize birds. This was Henrietta - prize bird everywhere - she who gave her Madison Square Gardens prize to the College Endowment Fund, and was given by President Woolley in return a signed document granting her Freedom of the Campus - a freedom, by the way, which the bird Henrietta on her own initiative had long enjoyed.
The college in those days was divided into two camps: those who thought Doctor Hooker's devotion to her Buff Orpintons understandable, and those who thought it 'singular.' Doctor Hooker's own best story about her hobby was the query of a lady on the boat from England. Miss Hooker was bringing Cassandra over from England to reinforce her flock. Cassandra was the 'Winning Pullet of England,' purchased direct from Mr. Cass. The captain of the boat gave Miss Hooker permission to keep Cassandra in an otherwise forbidden part of the upper deck; but he said he hoped she would not be obliged to tell the other passengers about her special privilege. A dowager from England who had watched Doctor Hooker going aloft many times a day finally succumbed to curiosity and eyed Doctor Hooker through a figurative lorgnette, saying, 'Have you a room up there?'
'No,' replied Doctor Hooker affably. 'A cage.'
Whereupon the lady's curiosity was in a state that might have been described in the phrase that Doctor Hooker herself once used when somebody asked about a friend who had been sent to the Infirmary with a high temperature: 'Getting no better very fast.'
It was Doctor Hooker and Doctor Clapp who took the historian John Fiske for a ride to see Titan's Pier. They had forgotten that in order to view it properly one had to go through a narrow opening in a fence. When they reined up Doctor Hooker's old horse, Thor Vic, abreast of that narrow aperture and started to get out, John Fiske, then at the peak load of his tremendous size, gave one look at the fence and said with dignity, 'Let us drive on.'
Taking warning from that experience, Doctor Hooker hesitated one day when an equally portly visitor asked her to guide him to the top of the cupola for a view. The cupola on top of the old building commanded a landscape much like the view one gets now from the top of Cornelia Clapp Tower. The stairway to the top of the cupola was steep. Doctor Hooker explained this fact to the visitor, who replied, 'Madame, it may surprise you, but the use of my legs is to me a pleasure.' And Miss Hooker always used to like to tell about a botanist in Germany with whom she used to exchange specimens. He wrote a letter thanking her for a collection she had sent him, and said he was especially pleased with the fine assortment, but that there was one request he would like to make: 'I have always,' said he, 'wanted to become an American tomato plant.'
The sayings of visitors are a part of every college book of proverbs. There was the remark, for instance, that Professor Hitchcock made to the Mount Holyoke students of 1873: 'Whatever you have on your tombstone, don't have Scared to Death.' There was the saying of the visiting lecturer in early March, 'That's a well-ventilated road up from Holyoke.' There was the telegram from the arctic explorer Stefansson before his lecture on his trip to the Pole. A snowstorm had come up on the morning before the lecture, and Stefansson telegraphed to know if the road to South Hadley was 'impassable.' Somebody suggested that the college ought to have telegraphed back, 'Dog sleds will meet you at Springfield.' There was Christopher Morley, who wrote that a certain date would be all right for a lecture, 'barring Act of God, barratry, scuttling, or mutiny by crew.' And there was Vachel Lindsay, who missed the committee sent down to greet him, took the car, and got off by mistake at the sash factory - and was discovered later marching up the road singing 'Sweet Rosy O'Grady' at the top of his voice.
The visiting musician who received traditionally the most encores at Mount Holyoke, however, was Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Every year he came; and every following year he was recalled, from the time of his first tour in 1901, when the college magazine referred to him as a 'new' pianist, up to the last year of his life. On Founder's Day, November 8, 1933, Mount Holyoke conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Music. When the service was over and most of the congregation had left the Chapel, Mr. Gabrilowitsch was talked with a group that had lingered, and said to them, 'Would you like a little tune?' Down he sat at the piano and played favorite after favorite - his way with the music and with the instrument seeming the very personification of piano-magic to all those among us who 'like a little tune.'
Oh, one could never get to the end of the legendary sayings: Miss Gertrude Cushing's favorite exclamation, 'Rap and Blissture' when she would fain say 'Bliss and Rapture'; and her firm rule for her classes in Spanish: Esta estictamente prohibido bostezar en la clase de espanol. ('It is forbidden to yawn in class.') Always we used to enjoy the remark in hopeful French once made by a Mount Holyoke student, who with others had engaged a carriage for a drive in Paris, and was at a loss how to give instructions to the driver. Settling herself comfortably she said to him, 'Proceed-y vooz along the Rue de Rivoli until the young ladies say Restez.' And there was one choice occasion when Miss Helen Patch had bought, in Paris, a cuckoo clock that did not work. She wanted to exchange it, so she said to the shopkeeper, 'Le Cuckoo ne cuckoo pas.' At least that is what her friends say she said. She herself insists that I mustn't use the story unless I will spell that verb 'couque' - 'Le coucou ne couque pas.' Anyway, she got a new clock.
Miss Mary O. Nutting at the Library used to say, when asked about something on which information was not immediately forthcoming, 'I do not now recall what I have known upon the subject!' - a remark that many have longed to echo in an emergency every since.
One of Mount Holyoke's former riding-masters, a Briton right out of Dickens, used to instruct his puils, 'Keep your 'orse well to the houtside of the motor-roads or you'll be hit broadcast.' And one day when a girl slipped from her horse in front of Mary Lyon he said ruefully as he mounted her again, 'You would fall off right before all them Deans and Registers.'
Those interested in bird-lore used to be taught by Miss Bowers how to imitate the bobolink's song by repeating the names of certain books of the Old Testament very fast. Try it at top speed in a high little bobolink voice - 'Genesis Exxodus Leviticus Numbers Joshua Judges Ruth - Ru-u-th - Ruth - Chronicles Chronicles?' ending on a rising chirp.
And certainly one of the most lilting remarks in all our history was made by Miss Elizabeth Blanchard in the early eighties. A popular student had learned that three young men, by sheer coincidence, had arrived to call upon her at the same time. She asked Miss Blanchard for permission to go down to the parlor to see them. 'Yes,' said Miss Blanchard, 'you may go down to see them, but behave so well that they will never come again.' The student immediately told her visitors what Miss Blanchard had said, and the ice among the three young men was broken in high glee.
There are plenty of legends-in-the-making at the present day. I hold my pencil tightly by its eraser lest it run too far. To be on the safe side, let me close this discussion with three quotations on the subject of campus memories: one written by a graduate of '81; the second by a present-day student of the class of 1939; and the third by a member of the class of 1925.
Mary Votey Smith, 1881, wrote the first and read it at the reunion of the fifty-year class in 1931:
An old lady friend of mine once said to me, 'It is a sad day when there is no one left to say to you, "Do you remember?"' White there are still a few of us to remember together, I have been taking a little journey of rememberings - a rambling journey in those far-gone years of common interests.And first, do you remember 'Paradise' and the fringed polygalas that grew there? And do you remember the wonderful blue of the birdfoot violets down back of the cemetery, and the little brook that meandered through the valley? . . .
Did you ever see Miss Blanchard crossing the court on a wet Sunday morning in her best black silk? Her skirts always seemed to billow out about the bottom, and she always held up her dress daintily in front from the damp path white it dipped to the ground in the rear with every step.
But there was one short dress on the campus. Do you remember it? And she bobbed her hair too. At least she did in my first year, which was soon after she came on the Faculty. Long skirts interfered with her climbing trees to look into birds' nests, and she had no time to fuss with doing up long hair. But how did Miss Ward ever allow it? Dear Miss Clapp! The most human, perhaps, of them all! What an asset she has been to Mount Holyoke!
Do you remember the Circles? A 'circle' until then had meant simply a ring, or a round body, or at most a Sewing Circle of charitably disposed ladies. But now we learned that a Circle was a bunch of girls, grouped together under a leader, and responsible for one particular piece of work. . . . Talk about modern efficiency! Was there ever a finer example of efficiency than that household furnished? Did ever a cog slip? Do you ever remember a meal that was not ready on time? We may have been tardy, from oversleeping or trying to fasten slippery cuffs on the way down a few flights of stiars, but I cannot remember that we ever had to wait for a meal to be served.
Do you remember when Miss Blanchard in Hall Exercises said, 'Young ladies, there are some American Missionaries in the east window. Those of you who would like one may take one as you go out.' That was a chance for us to select our own missionary. . . .
And do you remember 'plus time'? Have you ever since those halcyon days had such a thing as plus time? Hasn't it been, instead, minus time? How often in my over-full days, have I longed for just such a commodity. Mine was most often composition time. I could spend untold hours delving in encyclopedias and books of reference, with very meagre results in the way of copy to hand in. How I ever attained to the distinction of having one of mine among the compositions on the Commencement program, is beyond my comprehension.
And have you looked at that Commencement program lately? Can you imagine even us, who belonged to that era, now sitting through those arid examinations, fourteen of them, and all those compositions, no less arid, if mine was any sample? (I have it still.) I'll venture that some of those visitors slept through Butler's Analogy. . . . The musical numbers were a relief from the deadly sameness of the exams, but the program as a whole must have been an appalling affair.
Do any of you know what an exception is? I am not sure whether it is the sin we committed or the written apology for it that we handed in. At any rate, I'll venture that none of you has preserved a written 'exception.' I found one, and it seems as strange a relic as our program. Why this was not handed in, I do not know. Should I have carried a sense of unforgiven sin all these years? It reads, 'Please excuse speaking to my roommate during a quiet hour. She was ill.'
This last remembering will perhaps be too early for any of you. It was a fire - not one of those at which they burned up their church, but one that took the west side of the village street. It happened on a Sunday night in winter, when we were keeping quiet hours in our rooms. Some of us went up into the cupola to watch it, and I have never forgotten the weird but beautiful appearance of the cemetery on the other street, with the gravestones and the snow-covered ground all a vivid red. Word came to us in our watch-tower to go down to our rooms, take our fire-pails, and, not omitting to put on rubbers as well as coats, to go out on the street and pass water from our home supply. Filled pails were passed down one line and empty ones passed back by the other. And this was kept up until help arrived from Holyoke, and it took longer then than now.
It was something of a change for us so carefully guarded maidens from the quiet hour in our rooms to this exciting scene. And a Sunday night! There was a crowd of onlookers, some of them Holyoke dudes in their Sunday array of silk hats and gloves, who neglected the fire to walk up and down the lines of girls and make remarks. At last one spirited young lady raised the pail of water she was passing and dashed it over a manly form. I have forgotten whether the water was hot or cold - both were being used - and I do not know whether the aforesaid young lady handed in an exception the next day, as she should have done; but possibly she excused herself because there was no specific rule against drenching Holyoke dudes.
How little there is left of the Mount Holyoke we knew! The buildigns are gone, our teachers are gone, the curriculum is gone. The one-family life is no more. Paradise has disappeared; even the cemetery is gone. Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom are about all that is left. They still rear their heads skyward and are symbols of the eternal verities. Perhaps we must look up at them and consider that, as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so these familiar peaks are still guarding the spirit of the Mount Holyoke that we knew, and are preserving it for all time.
Yes, things have changed. But here are some impressions of th emodern campus, written in the spring of 1936 by a member of the class of 1939, and reprinted here with the permission of the author, Marcia S. Kidder, and of the freshman publication, The Sphinx.
September sun pours its warm light on everything. The campus is rose-brick and leaf-green. Tropical colored suits and tweed coats stand in long queues in Mary Lyon. Class-cards to get! Appointments to make! Rooms to hunt up! Freshman reception! Your whole life to remodel!Processions to Pearsons, Porter, Wilder, and Brigham move spasmodically. Fathers lift suitcases out of cars. Fathers make out checks and think they'd better start back. Mothers examine rooms. 'Of course curtains and things will make all the difference in the world. Shall I look for something in a plaid, then? Write as soon as you're settled. We'll be anxious to hear how you like it.'
Alone now, alone in a great crowd of others who are alone, yet have too much in common to be really alone. Eager freshmen exploring, speaking to everyone because they don't know anyone. 'What house are you in?' - 'Where are from?' - 'I must see Miss Newhall!' - 'What are you taking?'
Friendliness. Teas for freshmen, notes on your desk: '- and Kit asked me to look you up. Sorry you weren't in. Come over and see me.' First vespers with big sisters. Mr. Hammond playing Liebestraum. Everyone dreamy, thoughtful, completely contented in the darkness.
September suns have all set. It's incredible that autumn red and gold have come in and are already beginning to go. Early dusk. Girls hurrying all over campus. Dressing for dinner. Returning from lab. Going through P.O. Coming from choir. Drinking tea at the Book Shop.
The heels on the walks don't click now, going to the libe after dinner; they rustle in the first-fallen leaves. Clear nights. Keen, cold air. A bluish-white moon and the face of Mary Lyon, which freshmen still mistake for the September moon, peering through the trees. Bluebooks to study for. Midterm marks to worry about. The holiday to look forward to. 'Going home for Thanksgiving?' - 'Only thirteen more days!' - 'Look, it's snowing! How perfect!' - 'Going to the stude?'
Freshmen are in groups now. Their brown and white shoes are dirty and turned up at the toes. They feel as if they'd been here for years. The ground has frozen into footprints and dog tracks. The puddles have thin coats of ice.
Now the trees, grim black skeletons against the winter sunset, cast eerie shadows on the rose-tinted snow. People jump on the crust to hear its hollow crunch, crunch, crunch under their heavy ski boots.
More snow falls, giving each minute twig an edge of white, like poster lettering. It sneaks inside coat collars and melts. It sparkles in the light and throws polka-dot shadows against the buildings. It makes the walks all wet and glistening and spreads a thin white frosting over the old dingy snow. Skiing on Prospect! Skidding to class! Rubbing cold hands! Drinking hot coffee! Putting on warm furry boots!
Even the libe is noisy with the clump, clump of heavy ski boots. The campus is dotted with bright colored ski-suits, like a great poster of the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps. Wooden planks on steps and over walks. Canvas mats leading from the front door to the inside hall. The mail comes a little later now, and one has to jump two dirty snow banks to cross College Street. Everything depends on the cold and the snow. 'I bought some red ear-muffs.' - 'My skis came today!' - 'Go skating with me?' - 'My feet froze last night!'
Mud everywhere. Budded trees. Warm sun. Longer days. Windows are open, with heads popping out. People study on the Pageant Field. Blue sky. Upper Lake terribly high. Little rivulets run beside the walks. Here and there a small patch of sordid snow.
Happier faces! Shorter hair! Lighter colors! New shoes! Seniors dash about the campus in cars. The zo [sic] and ecology classes wade in Upper Lake in search of specimens. The tennis courts are thronged all afternoon. . . . Nights are cool and dewy with the shrill histling of the peepers penetrating the darkness. . . .
Those are the impressions written in the springtime of a freshman year, only day before yesterday, in 1936. And here, from 1925, is a poem by an upper-classman. With permission of the author, Julia Abbe, and Miss Ada L. F. Snell, editor of Mount Holyoke College Verse, which was published in 1928 by the Oxford University Press, the lines are reprinted here:
College professors say I must remember
That the gamete has one allelemorph,
And the zygone two:
That corn is not high because rent is paid,
But rent is paid because corn is high;
That acids turn blue litmus red,
And bases turn red litmus blue;
That the nearest star is four-and-three-tenths light-years away;
That in fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Lorenzo de Medici died,
The Moors were expelled from Spain,
Alexander VI became Pope,
And Columbus discovered America;
That 'pecheur' means 'sinner,'
And 'pecheur' means 'fisher,' -
And a thousand other things
I have forgotten already.
But I shall always remember the President's dogs;
Irish songs from the kitchen; breakfast oranges;
Plays in the garret; birthday candles; pageants;
The unexpected hurry of voices on Saturday nights; village children;
The clock striking;
Sudden frenzies to read every book in the library all at once;
A gladness when Chem Lab was over;
Hills in the wind; the way a turtle kicked when I picked him up;
The painting of a king walking barefoot through the snow;
The silver halo Mademoiselle saw around violets;
Taps on my door followed by the voices of friends;
And the silence when we heard that one had died.
Taps on my door, followed by the voices of friends. . . . After all, the legends of a college are lost legends unless we can tell them to our friends, kindred spirits who will laugh or ponder, or remember them with us, or cap our story with another and another from some equally allegorical human scene.