and Dian's nymphs,
Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and
dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn.
To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down
among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting
Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens was ever so
vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past
Tree Days.

On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a
pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall
once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger
sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the
wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession
winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors
and sophomores and freshmen,--more than fourteen hundred of them
in 1914. Then it breaks ranks and plants itself in parterres
at the foot of the hill, masses of blue, and rose, and lavender,
and golden blossoming girls. Contrary Mistress Mary's garden was
nothing to it. And after the procession come the dances. Sometimes
a Breton Pardon wanders across the sea. The gods from Olympus
are very much at home in these groves of academe. Once King Arthur's
knight came riding up the wide avenue at the edge of the green.
The spirits of sun and moon, the nymphs of the wind and the rain,
have woven their mystical spells on that great greensward. And
in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and
freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies.

The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake
than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities.
And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful
exotics, Japanese golden evergreens--one for 1879 and one for
1880. The two trees were planted on May 16, 1877, the sophomore
tree by the library, the freshman tree by the dining room. An
early chronicler writes, "Then it was that the venerated spade
made its first appearance. We had confidently expected a trowel,
had written indeed 'Apostrophe to the Trowel' on our programs,
and our apostrophist (do not see the dictionary), a girl of about
the same height as the spade, but by no means, as she modestly
suggested, of the same mental capacity, was so stricken with
astonishment when she had mounted the rostrum and this burly
instrument was propped up before her, that she nearly forgot her
spee