ory. Multitudes of
guests who had been camping for a night or two in the recitation
rooms--our temporary dormitories--gave themselves up to the boyish
delights of school-life, and set numerous examples which the students
were only too glad to follow. The boat race on the lake was a picture;
the champion baseball match, a companion piece; but the highly decorated
prize scholars, glittering with gold and silver medals, and badges of
satin and bullion; the bevies of beautiful girls who for once--once only
in the year--were given the liberty of the lawns, the campus, and the
winding forest ways, that make of Notre Dame an elysium in summer; the
frequent and inspiring blasts of the University Band, and the general
joy that filled every heart to overflowing, rendered the last day of the
scholastic year romantic to a degree and memorable forever.

There was no sleep during the closing night--not one solitary wink; all
laws were dead-letters--alas that they should so soon arise again from
the dead!--and when the wreath of stars that crowns the golden statue of
Our Lady on the high dome, two hundred feet in air, and the
wide-sweeping crescent under her shining feet, burst suddenly into
flame, and shed a lustre that was welcomed for miles and miles over the
plains of Indiana--then, I assure you, we were all so deeply touched
that we knew not whether to laugh or to weep, and I shall not tell you
which we did. The moon was very full that night, and I didn't blame it!

But the picnic really began at the foot of the great stairway in front
of the dear old University next morning. Five hundred possible
presidents were to be distributed broadcast over the continent; five
hundred sons and heirs to be returned with thanks to the yearning bosoms
of their respective families. The floodgates of the trunk-rooms were
thrown open, and a stream of Saratogas went thundering to the station at
South Bend, two miles away. Hour after hour, and indeed for several
days, huge trucks and express wagons plied to and fro, groaning under
the burden of well-checked luggage. It is astonishing to behold how big
a trunk a mere boy may claim for his very own; but it must be remembered
that your schoolboy lives for several years within the brass-bound
confines of a Saratoga. It is his bureau, his wardrobe, his private
library, his museum and toy shop, the receptacle of all that is near and
dear to him; it is, in brief, his _sanctum sanctorum_, the one inviolate