It is worth while having come through months of winter, full of varying
fortunes, to wake at last in the glory of Spring Term.
Spring Term! Those of us who have had it,--what wouldn't we give to be
able to drift backward for a moment and feel the wonder of Spring Term
around us again? Sweet with its apple-blossoms, prodigal of its
sunshine, giving away New England in a strange manner, showing that she
possesses a wildness and radiance of youth that for three-fourths of the
year she denies.
For Spring Term is satisfaction. There is enough of it. When its magic
first comes to the freshman she thinks there will be eons more of Spring
Terms.
But there will not be. Only four of them in a lifetime--during those
years when the newness of life is fresh, when the power to respond sings
through every girl's heart its most exultant tune.
A more or less bony livery horse, perked up for spring, with the
inevitable runabout, stood before each campus house's back door in those
days.
When his hirers came down from their rooms, they undid the knot about
the hitching post and, picking up the reins, slapped them on the beast's
back and careened away, out into the wonderworld their Hampton had
become.
Red canoes began to flash across the bright and shallow waters of
Paradise.
Rubber-soled shoes slapped their way to the tennis courts, and their
wearers sat for hours without any alleviating shade, just to have
possession of a court at last for sixty minutes.
"I don't know _what_ I've ever done to deserve it," said Peggy, leaning
on her window-sill beside Katherine, while the two looked out on it all.
"I've heard the upperclass girls tell some of our freshmen when they
were homesick, 'Wait till Spring Term.' Now I understand what they
meant," returned Katherine slowly.
"Oh, room-mate, I am glad I belong to such a world. Wouldn't it
be--wouldn't it be _terrible_ to have Spring Term come along and be a
senior--or an _alum_?"
"Seniors graduate--I suppose they don't realize it's all for the last
time--maybe they do, though. But alums!" Katherine caught her arm and
pressed it in an odd panic. "Do you suppose we will actually some day
be--that?" she asked with a shudder.
Peggy laughed out into the sunshine. "Not for ages and ages. Three years
more--why, that's almost the same as forever. Katherine," she changed
the subject suddenly, "I wish we had a canoe! Watch those adorable ones
on Paradise--see the drops sparkle off that paddle--oh, Kathie, let's
have one, h'mm?"
Katherine was immediately beside herself with joy.
"We can get one second-hand from a girl down at Weldon House," she said
joyously. "I heard about it the other day."
Peggy demurred. "I don't want a second-hand one," she declared
decidedly. "I want a new one, that nobody has ever adventured in before
us. I don't know how to paddle though, do you?"
"No, except that the girl at Weldon that wants to sell this one I
mentioned took me out in hers and sort of advertised it by letting me
experiment with the paddle awhile. I nearly tipped us over and she was
so anxious to have me buy the boat she never said a word."
Within the next few days Peggy and Katherine wrote to Canada to see
about the prices of canoes. They labored long and hard in the gymnasium
pool and took the swimming tests that were necessary for a college
permit for canoe ownership.
And then, sad, and sickening disappointment, they found that freshmen
weren't allowed to own canoes at all!
They left the boat-house with downcast eyes, but the glory of the day
soon made them lift their gaze, and the first thing they saw was a
joyous crew of their classmates going to sea in a moist-floored
row-boat.
In a moment life was as full of promise as ever and the two plunged down
the boat-house steps and gave their gymnasium numbers in to charter the
first craft of a similar kind that came along.
"The water's just as--wet, under this," laughed Peggy as they finally
pushed off.
"And the oars are just as hard to use as a paddle," cried Katherine, who
had just dropped one overboard. "Oh, thank you,--yes, we can manage it
all right; yes, _indeed_, we've had our swimming test!" This last was to
the boat-house boy who rescued the oar and who seemed overly concerned
for their safe voyage.
"Paradise," breathed Peggy softly, a little while later, as they drifted
under the shade of the overhanging trees and looked up toward the
glowing green campus and the bright and exotic botanical gardens of
Hampton. "Only the river is named that--but it's _all_ paradise. Oh,
Katherine, Katherine, I think we've had a happy year, don't you?"
But Katherine was not inclined at the moment to be either poetical or
retrospective. "Mercy!" she cried out sharply, "now I've caught my oar
on a root!"
The bright days sped all too fast. A few walks around Hospital Hill, a
climb up Mt. Tom, a number of evening street-car rides when the girls
sat on the front seat outside the car just back of the motorman with the
wind blowing through their hair, a jaunt or so to a distant tea-house, a
drive behind one of the bony mares, a few negligible recitations and
examinations--and--poof!--they were gone like smoke.
The freshmen were urged to gather up their belongings and hasten home as
soon as possible so that the campus rooms would be vacant for that
greatest drama of the spring soon to be staged at Hampton--the
commencement exercises for the senior class.
"And you and I aren't to see a bit of it," grieved Peggy to her
room-mate. "I suppose they are keeping it all a mystery from us until we
get nearer it ourselves. Don't forget to write to me often and _often_
this summer, Kathie,--it seems strange I'm not going to see you for so
long a time."
"Yes, I'll write, of course, child. I'll miss you and I'll miss Hamp,
but I'll be glad to be home for a while, at that. My mother wants me and
so do the rest of the dear folks. I'm so eager to get there I don't know
what to do--and yet my eyes are all full of tears at leaving, at the
same time."
"Well, we ought to be laughing instead of crying--neither of us got any
conditions or low grades except----"
"Now you needn't remind me of that. I got that low grade in botany
because I couldn't draw, not because I didn't know the lessons. It's
funny if you have to be an artist for every course----"
"Never mind, Kathie, I barely came out on the safe side of math. I'm
going to have a bonfire of my trigonometry and my old higher algebra as
soon as I get off the train at home. _They_ shall never cause anybody
else such misery."
"I'll give you my botany book to throw in with them."
"All right, your botany book is elected to the conflagration."
"I know one thing that _won't_ go in."
"What's that, my dear?"
"A certain number of the _Hampton College Monthly_."
A quick color swept over Peggy's face.
Laughingly she caught her room-mate's arm and started with her on an
expedition to round up the freshmen of the house for a last half day
together while they still enjoyed their lowly state.
Florence Thomas, Myra Whitewell, Doris Winterbean, Gertrude Van Gorder,
Lilian Moore and May Jenson they summoned out onto the campus where they
were all content to stroll, arms intertwined, meeting other groups who
were, like themselves, bidding Hampton farewell for the summer.
It was late afternoon, with the sun streaming over everything and the
houses and trees casting their long quiet shadows over the grass, when
there drifted by a group of seniors, singing idly one of their senior
songs.
The music of it caught Peggy's heart and she shut her eyes against the
tears. There were senior celebrities in that group--girls whom she had
known very well by sight--whom she would never see again. Part of
college they had been, and now they were humming their senior song for
the last time across that dear old campus.
How could they bear to leave--when it was to be shut on the outside of
the college gates always--except as they flitted back through the years
in the doubtful and unenviable role of alumnae?
With a full heart Peggy was glad she was just beginning, glad that she
would shout for her class's red lion emblem at basketball matches and
polo ground for three years more, glad that she was to return and buy,
in the pride of her sophomoreship, her little red canoe, glad that
college was still brimming over with experiences for her, as yet untried
and unguessed.
"Come quickly, Peggy," cried Gloria Hazeltine, passing the Ambler girls
on a run, "Glee club's having a sing over by Seelye Hall. Hurry, or
you'll miss some of it."
Glad of the opportunity to be with so great a number of girls once more
before vacation, the Ambler freshmen began to run too, and soon the
voices of the glee club carried to them.
Through the crowd that had gathered they caught glimpses of the singers'
white dresses.
"They're singing 'Where-oh-where,'" cried Katherine.
And as the words of the familiar song were wafted out to them, Peggy and
Katherine smiled their queer pride and happiness into each other's eyes,
since for the first time the song applied to _Them_.
"Where, oh, where are those verdant freshmen?
Where, oh, where are those verdant freshmen?
Where, oh, _Where_ are those verdant freshmen?
Sa-afe _now_ in the Soph'more Class!"