It was ten o'clock and time for John Stuart Mill to give place to Mary Jane, so Stoughton threw the former into an arm-chair and took the latter from the mantel-piece. He filled and lighted her affectionately, and the content of the evening pipe came upon him. Then he bethought him of beer and pleasant converse, and strolled around to the Pudding in pursuit thereof.

There he found the usual ten o'clock "resting convention" in session beneath its blue cloud of nicotine. The "earnest resters," as Burleigh termed them, were stretched about in various attitudes, more of laziness than repose. They were just then engaged in the popular pastime of blackguarding the last number of the Lampoon for the benefit of Hudson, one of the editors.

"Hullo, Dick," remarked that gentleman, glad to change the subject as Stoughton entered, "we knew you were coming; smelt Mary Jane as soon as you turned the corner."

"Did you, really," replied Stoughton, making room for himself on the sofa by removing Rattleton's legs to a neighboring chair, and spilling the dog Blathers on the floor. "What was that chum of yours doing in the building last night? Were you also engaged in the unseemly disturbance?"

"No," answered Hudson, "I had nothing to do with it. I decline all responsibility for Edward Burleigh. I am not my room-mate's keeper."

"I heard him carolling on the stairs at an hour when singing should be left to the little birds. He hammered on my door for a while, but I knew enough not to get up. I wonder he didn't raise the proctor. He shouted, through my key-hole, something about the war being over."

"Yes," said Hudson, "that was what he told me when he woke me up by sitting on my chest. He was going to carry the good news all through the Yard, but I persuaded him to go to bed and wait until morning."

"Where had he been?"

"Well, you see, Jack Randolph carried him off yesterday evening to a meeting of the Southern Club, as an invited guest, to span the bloody chasm with him. They spanned it a good many times there, I guess, and then as it was a beautiful moonlight night and perfect sleighing, they decided that the bloody chasm ought to be spanned in Brookline and other neighboring towns. So they got a cutter, and must have conducted spanning operations on a wide scale all over the country, for they didn't get back until dawn. George Smith, the policeman, says he saw them sitting on the steps of Harvard Hall, singing 'John Brown's Body' and 'Dixie,' and hymns of peace while the sun rose."

"I deny the aspersion on the Southern Club," exclaimed 'Colonel' Dixey, from the other end of the long sofa. "I was present at the meeting, and we had nothing to induce sunrise hymns. I don't know what Jack and Ned did afterwards, but they didn't get it at the Southern Club."

This somewhat veiled assertion raised an incredulous chorus: "Oh, Dixey, may you be forgiven." "Come, come, Colonel, do you mean to persuade us that an organization containing at least three members from Kentucky is run on a cold-water basis?" "Where is the glory of your old commonwealth?" "Bet the meeting was full of rum—rum and rebellion! Don't deny it, Colonel." "Drink and treason!"

"Neither, sir, neither," replied Dixey to this chaff. "I grieve to hear such narrow-minded accusations. Prexy was there and made a speech.—Oh, Holworthy! You know that man we saw yesterday in the Transept of Memorial? He was at the Southern Club with Prexy."

"Oh, yes," said Holworthy, "who was he?"

"A grad. from Georgia. I have forgotten his name."

"I thought he was a grad., and not a stranger, for he didn't have a guide book, and didn't ask us to show him the "campus." Had he been a soldier?"

"Didn't say. If so, he was probably a Confed."

"Well, he looked like an interesting old cock anyway," said Holworthy to the others. "He was standing before one of the tablets with his hat off. Somehow, when we saw him, our own hats felt so uncomfortable that we took them off, too, as we passed through."

"Holly made up all sorts of poetry about him," added Dixey.

"No, I didn't; but I do think he did the right thing in uncovering."

"Of course he did," said Ernest Gray, emphatically. "No man ought to keep his hat on in that transept."

"Oh, now you've done it, Hol," groaned Stoughton. "You have started the 'Only Serious.'"

"We get too careless going back and forth in it every day," continued Gray. "We don't fully appreciate it, or we forget what it means."

"Forget what it means! Great Scott, Ernest, have you never heard a Class Day oration or poem? What would our inspired youths do without the poor, hard-worked old transept? How did they ever get inspired before it was built? Don't we have our hearts fired all up at least once a year on that subject?"

"Except those of us who may have been previously fired by the Dean," put in Rattleton, with a contemplative sigh over eminent possibilities.

"Well, it is a pity then that the Class Day conflagration doesn't last a little longer. I don't believe in keeping sentiment for special occasions. It would be better for all hands to preserve a little of it throughout the year, and in this place, of all others, I should think at least a little reverence for the past might be kept alive. But one might suppose that there was no such thing as reverence at Harvard nowadays."

"Hooray!" "Hear, hear!" "Go it, old man!" "Good for the Only Serious!" "Pegasus in a canter!"

"That's right," answered Gray warmly, to this burst of invidious encouragement. "Laugh at anything that is serious or the least approach to feeling; it is the fashion."

"Brought on by over-doses of gush," remarked Stoughton, knocking the ashes contemptuously out of Mary Jane.

"Of course, there is a lot of twaddle talked about such things," answered Gray, "and I acknowledge that exaggeration tends to cheapen patriotism, but the existence of a lot of tinsel in the world doesn't make gold less valuable, does it?"

"Quite true," assented Hudson, "and because Dick Stoughton smokes such a pipe as Mary Jane, there is no reason why we should all give up tobacco. That is a better simile than yours."

"Well, it is a good thing that Harvard men have not always been so afraid of appearing in earnest," growled Gray. "I don't believe there was so much brilliant wit wasted when men were leaving college every day to join their regiments. I wish I had been here then."

"So do I," drawled Rattleton; "what a bully excuse a fellow would have had for not getting his degree."

"What an excitement there must have been," went on Gray, without noticing the interruption. "Just think of being cheered out of the Yard when you left for the war, and then perhaps distinguishing yourself, and coming back to Class Day with your arm in a sling."

"Just think of coming back in a pine-box," added Hudson, graphically.

"Well, suppose you did? You have got to die some time, and your name would have been put on a tablet in memorial."

"Yes, but you wouldn't have been tickled by seeing it there," said the irritating Stoughton. "Half your patriotism is vanity, Ernest, you shallow theatrical poser."

"It would do you men good to read the Memorial Biographies," Gray continued, now thoroughly aroused, and paying no attention to the side remarks. "They ought to be part of the prescribed work for a degree."

"Yes, but as Hudson says, you couldn't do that if you were a biographee," reasoned Dane Austin, the law-school man, taking a hand in the baiting.

"It would be perfectly disgusting to hear you fellows talk this way," Gray declared, "if one didn't know that it was all affectation. I am not sure that that fact does not make it worse. You all really feel just as I do, but you are afraid to say so."

"Another appalling case of Harvard indifference," observed Stoughton. "The modern dilettante has no noble desire for red war."

"He likes to make people believe that he has no noble desire for anything, and he has a morbid fear of being a hypocrite. As a matter of fact, you are all of you the worst kind of hypocrites, for you try to appear worse than you are."

"Oh, dear, no," Rattleton protested, lazily, "that would be too hard work for any of this crowd—except me."

"A war would be a good thing to stir you up. I almost wish the war times would come again," exclaimed Gray, hotly.

"Now you are getting right down to work," laughed Hudson. "What a rise we are getting out of our earnest young man to-night."

"You let your feelings get away with you, Gray," added Holworthy. "I don't believe it was all glory and enthusiasm in those days. You forget there was another side to it. For instance, Jack Randolph's governor was not cheered out of the Yard when he left for the war."

"Yes, there was another side to it," came a voice from the other end of the room, and a big arm-chair, that had been facing the fire with its back to the knot of men, was pushed around so as show its occupant. He was evidently one of that wide class known to the undergraduate as the "Old Grads." An old grad. attains his title as soon as he ceases to be a very young grad.; there is no transition degree. In this case he seemed about middle aged, perhaps fifty, with hair turning gray, and a rather deeply marked brown face. The latter was just then a little flushed, and had the expression often seen on a face that has just been looking a long time into a fire and a long way through it.

The lounging students started a little at this sudden interruption, and stirred as young men do on finding themselves suddenly in the presence of an older one. Rattleton took his long legs down from their supporting chair, Hudson pushed his hat back from his nose to its proper place, Dixey took his hands out of his pockets and sat up straight, while Dick Stoughton paused in the act of relighting Mary Jane, and when the match burnt his fingers forbore to swear. As the cause of the disturbance rose and came towards them they stood up. Hollis Holworthy showed signs of positive uneasiness. He turned bright red in the face, as he recognized the man whom he had just described as "an interesting old cock."

"I—I beg your pardon, sir," he began, "I had no idea——"

"That the old cock was present?" laughed the older man. "I assure you, my boy, that I was not in the least offended, and even had I cause for offence, I deserved it. Your remark was a retribution, a striking repetition of history. I remember once asking Holworthy of '61 who the bully old boy in the beaver hat was, and the bully old boy proved to be Holworthy '32. Thirty years are like a spy-glass—your views depend upon the end through which you look."

The thirty years melted at once beneath the laugh that followed this introduction, and, as the stranger took a chair among the group, the smoke went up again from Mary Jane and other pipes.

"Then you were in college with my father?" asked Holworthy. "You must have been here just in the time of which we were speaking."

"That is the reason why I took the liberty of joining so abruptly in your conversation," said the graduate. "I want to tell you young men a story. I have never told it before, and would not tell it to any other audience, but I know that it can be fully appreciated by you, and it belongs to your traditions. So I am going to give it to you, if you do not mind being bored for a while by an old grad."

"I don't think any of us will raise any serious objections," said Stoughton, as he paused.

The graduate smiled and then began: "As I said when I just now interrupted your discussion, there was another side to the glory of the war times in the old college. To the war itself there was, of course, another side, and I was on it. Up to the breaking of the storm we boys had not troubled ourselves much about the out-look. Most of us took politics lightly, and though burning then, still, among us at least, they were, as now I suppose, more the subject of good-natured chaff than of bitter feelings. However deeply the more thoughtful of us may have felt, they never allowed their convictions to interfere with their friendships. Of course, there were a few loud-mouthed zealots who made themselves disagreeable, but they were as much so to men of their own opinions as to those of the opposite.

"Hardly any one really expected war, or, if he did, ever said so. The historic shot fired on Sumter was, therefore, as much of a shock to our little community as to all of the North—even more, for a civil war meant more to us. To us, you know, fraternity is a reality.

"When the news came so that it could not be denied, it was not talked of between us Southerners and the rest. Next came the news that my State had gone out. That night my chum Jim Standish and I sat in our window-seat and smoked a long time without speaking. Finally the question came from him, 'Well, old man, are you going?' I said, 'Yes.' Then he put out his hand and I took it hard. When we had nearly finished our pipes Jim spoke again, 'When this is over, Tom,' he said, 'you will come back and get your degree with us.' I shook my head, I remember, and answered: 'It won't be over until long after our commencement—or else Harvard will be in a country foreign to me.'

"You see I remember that evening and the conversation very vividly. It was all we ever held on the subject. I knew what Jim's opinions were, and he knew mine well enough; but he was too much of a gentleman to make my position any harder for me than it was. I was going to do what I considered my duty,—let that pass now also; it was more than a quarter of a century ago.

"Very soon the letter came from home, but I did not need it to hurry me. Jim and I were together almost every minute until I went away, and all my other friends seemed to go out of their way to show me courtesy and affection.

"The night before I left was Strawberry Night at the Pudding, and I remember I had intended not to go to the rooms. They were then in the top of Stoughton. I was packing in my room when Jim and Harry Rodes and one or two others came in, as a committee, to insist on my going. The committee accomplished its purpose by the usual smooth-tongued diplomacy of the undergraduate. They told me not to make a damn fool of myself, and that if I did not come round like a man, the theatricals should not go on. So I went, and tried to forget on my last night in the Yard that there was any world outside of it. That is the play-bill of those theatricals hanging over there on the wall now. What a time we had that night!

"I went home next day, with Clayton Randolph, Jack Randolph's father, as the rising generation always puts it. There was not much difficulty in getting South at that time. I enlisted soon after I arrived, and, as a result, was rather busy for four years.

"Of course, for a long time I heard nothing from Cambridge. You boys know how almost the whole graduating class went to the front, and many an underclassman did not wait for his Commencement. You can read the degrees won by some of them in Memorial Hall. Every now and then I saw in that precious booty, a Northern newspaper, a name that I had last heard called in a recitation, or had myself many a time shouted across the Yard.

"The stray Northern papers were not my source of news in all cases. There was one name that for a time was in the mouths of all our men, and I had to risk their scorn and suspicion in defending it. They would hardly believe that the man who could lead a black regiment, and die in the front of his niggers in that terrible charge on Fort Wagner, was not a hardened ruffian, a desperate mercenary, but a fair-haired boy of five-and-twenty, and the most sunny, lovable gentleman that ever left the ballroom for the battle-field.

"I saw myself the fall of a man of different mould, but of the same metal. We were holding a strong position and had repulsed two heavy charges, when we saw the enemy forming for a third. This time they came closer than in either of the previous attempts, and it looked for a minute as if they would reach us. But our fire was frightful, aided by several batteries that were pouring in grape and canister at short range. The regiment immediately in front of us came on well; but no body of men could stand it, and at last it wavered and then broke. Through the smoke I could see a mounted officer tearing about and trying desperately to rally the men, striking with the flat of his sword, and evidently beside himself with anger. Then, as he found it was no use and his men left him, he turned, rode all alone straight at us, and was shot through and through. I have seen too much of what is ordinarily called courage to be attracted to a man solely by that commonest of virtues; but this man's splendid scorn of surviving his failure, his fury at what he considered disgrace, and his deliberate self-sacrifice, lifted his act above the common run of bravery. That man had breeding, and I wanted to have a look at him. After the fight was over, I went to where he lay dead with his horse. It was Boredon of '61. I had hated that man. He had been one of those disagreeable cranks of whom I have spoken, a man absorbed with one idea and allowing that idea to color all his feelings, and spoil his manners. He had been to me as a red rag to a bull. But when I recognized him there, I would have given a great deal to have been able to tell him how proud I was of him. Evidently he had at least the hard part of a gentleman. I went back to my brother officers, and, with a good deal of boyish swagger I am afraid, said to them, 'That fellow was at Harvard with me. That is the sort of fools they make there.'

"Well, the war went on until we were hemmed in around Richmond in '64. It was at that time that I ran across Clayton Randolph, whom I had not seen since we left Cambridge together. I came near not recognizing him in the circumstances in which I found him. A battery of artillery had got stuck in the mud, but as I came up to it the last gun was being dragged out. An officer seemed to be doing most of the work, shoving on the wheels and encouraging his tired men. Shortly afterwards we were again halted next to the same battery, and there was the same officer sitting on a stump. His old uniform was covered with mud and axle-grease; his beard was four days' old; but he was Clayton Randolph, Randolph the dandy, Randolph, the model of neatness, whose perfect clothes had always been an object of chaff among us; Randolph, whose heaviest labor had been to polish his hat, and deepest thought to plan a dinner. He was sharing his piece of stale cornbread with a hungry little darky. You may imagine that we were rather glad to see each other. Clayton, however, had no more Cambridge news to give me than I had to give him, which was rather a disappointment. His battery was stationed near my regiment that winter, so we managed to see a good deal of each other in camp.

"One day, as I was sitting in front of my tent, I saw Clayton come galloping into the company street as though carrying urgent despatches. On seeing me he began shouting and waving his cap, as if there was danger that I might not see him and hear what he had to say. He was evidently beside himself about something,—and so was I, when he pulled up and yelled: 'What do you think? Jim Standish is in Libby prison!'

"I forget how he had learned this, but I remember he was very sure of it. By great luck and much energy we both managed to get leave that same day, and go to Richmond together; but we were disappointed in our hopes of seeing Jim. We turned every stone we could, and tried our best with the authorities, but it was no use; we could not get into the prison. There had been several escapes at that time, and no visitor of any sort was allowed to enter. The provost in charge, however, who knew Clayton, told us we might send Jim a letter, subject, of course, to its examination by the authorities. So we wrote him that we were there, and asked if there was anything he wanted us to send him. We explained that we could not get in to see him, but that he must write us all the news he could.

"In a short time the guard who had taken our note came back and asked what relation to us 'that young feller' was. We told him no relation by blood, but something a little closer, perhaps. 'Well,' said he, 'I never saw a feller take on so when I give him your note. He begged me to let him talk to you, and he most cried. Then he begged worse kind just to let him look out of a window where he could see you. He asked which side of the house you was on, and I reckon if I'd ha' told him he'd ha' made a break for the window and risked my shootin' him. I was right sorry, but I couldn't do nothin' for him but get him some paper. He's writin' you a letter now, and says for you to be sure and wait for it.'

"There was no danger of our not waiting for it. Neither of us had heard a word from the old place or from any of our friends for three years. I suppose none of you boys has ever been separated from his college friends for a longer time than the long vacation?"

"I was away for a year after graduating," answered Dane Austin. "I was abroad with a classmate, and I remember the first long letter from one of our chums; all about the Springfield game, and what all 'the gang' were doing. We read that letter over every day for a month."

"Then you can imagine what it was to get news after three years, and three such years. We waited and waited for that letter, and at last it came out to us—a regular volume. I have it now. I don't believe Jim ever wrote so much in all his college work put together. We sat with our backs against a wall while I read it aloud.

"First it gave us all the news from Cambridge;—among other things, that we had won the boat-race on Lake Quinsigamond. Randolph said that almost made up for Gettysburg, and we had a little cheer all to ourselves. I remember a man came running up to hear what the news was and whether the Yankees had been licked anywhere. We told him not that we knew of, but Harvard had beaten Yale, and he went off damning us for making such a row about nothing. The letter went on to say that there would probably be no race that year, as most of the rowing men had gone off to the war. Almost all of our old set had gone into the army, it said. That jolly, good-for-nothing rattle, bad Bob Bowling, who was always on the ragged edge of expulsion, always in hot water with the Faculty, and who had been booked by every one for a very bad end, had disappointed them all and found a distinguished career in a cavalry regiment. But the hero of the class was little Digges, 'Nancy' Digges, the quiet, shy, little pale-faced student who looked as if he would blow away in a strong wind, and whom no one had thought was good for anything but grubbing for Greek roots. This man had been promoted several times for gallantry. At Gettysburg, when Longstreet's corps was right on top of his battery, when his supports had been driven in, his horses shot, and his gunners were falling around him, he had dragged his guns back by hand, one by one, and stopped to spike the last while one of our men was reaching for him with a bayonet. When I read this we both exclaimed: 'Well, I'll be hanged, Little Nancy!'"

"It was at Gettysburg also that Jim had seen Harry Rodes. The last time that Jim had seen him before that was just before leaving college, when Rodes had been elected president of the Hasty Pudding; this time he was lying in the grass, where it was red. There was like news of several other old chums.

"'As for your humble servant,' Jim wrote, 'he has only succeeded in getting himself ignominiously jugged by your Johnnies.' I heard, long afterwards, how he had been captured, pinned under his dead horse, with a broken sabre, and three of our men to his score. 'This is not so much fun,' he went on, 'as that night in the Newton jail, which perhaps you may remember, Tom. You got me into that, you riotous companion and perverter of my youth.' I remembered that scrape of our Sophomore year very well, but I had a strong impression that it was Jim who upset the officer of the law. He told us he could stand Libby, however, well enough, if he only had a little smoke, and asked if we could not give aid and comfort to the invader in the shape of tobacco. At this Randolph exclaimed: 'Jim Standish without his pipe! That is a real case of suffering among the prisoners!' The letter wound up with an injunction to answer it at once and tell all about ourselves and the other boys on our side, and with the hope that we should all be at the next triennial dinner.

"As soon as we had read the letter we went off and spent all our savings in tobacco. That was the only cheap thing in Richmond in those days, and we got enough to last Jim for months, though I have no doubt that he at once gave most of it away. Then we got some paper, and wrote him all we knew of the Harvard men on our side of the fence. We could give an equally good account of them, too; for though, as disobedient children, Alma Mater has frowned on us, she never had cause to blush. We finished the letter before it was time for us to go back to camp, and sent it with the tobacco to Jim. We promised to try again to see him, but neither of us could get leave for a long time. If we had there would have been little chance of our getting into Libby; and if we had gotten into Libby, we should not have found Jim there."

As the speaker paused Stoughton asked, "Why? did he es——" and then stopped, inwardly cursing himself, as he noticed a look that was coming into the face of the narrator. But the latter at once relieved him immensely by continuing.

"Yes, he escaped—very soon after our visit. A lot of prisoners got out together, Jim among them. The news was sent to all the troops near Richmond and instructions to keep a sharp lookout for them. Jim managed to get to our very outer lines, and one pitch-dark night tried to run the picket. The officer in command saw him in the brush and challenged him. Jim, trusting to the darkness and his old hundred-yard records, tried to make a dash for it. The officer fired and shot—shot him down like a dog."

The speaker's cigar had apparently gone out, and no one looked at him while he relit it. They looked at the walls where the firelight danced over the rollicking play-bills of thirty years ago. In a moment the graduate spoke again:

"As I leaned over the dearest friend I ever had, we recognized each other and he smiled. I took his head in my lap and he died holding my hand."

"Then you saw him before he died? Were you with the picket?" asked Gray.

"Yes.—I commanded the picket."