Kansas University Weekly.
191
The Princeton Sesquicentennial. (Concluded from last week.)
The college authorities had evidently ordered their sesquicentennial weather a long time in advance, and with excellent discrimination, reserving the finest till the third and last day. How our official delegate would have rejoiced if he could have accompanied me early that morning on the bicycle ride I took with my host over one of the perfect roads now so numerous in New Jersey. In electing to go to Princeton on the latest morning train I took chances of being unable to secure a seat at the principal event of all; but I was just on the spot as the doors of Alexander Hall were thrown open, and my seat though no more comfortable than that of the preceding day was a better one to see and hear from. Having secured it there was nothing to do for half an hour but to hold it while waiting for the academic procession to appear. People pressed in till every inch of standing room was taken, the vestibules and stairways where one could hear nothing and see less were also packed, two or three thousand people were within the building and two or three thousand more were unable to obtain admission. During this time a gowned organist was endeavoring to entertain the audience and display the fine new instrument just erected in the hall; but with the exception of an occasional chord fortissimo, or perhaps a phrase or two during a lull, he succeeded in displaying only his mastery of technique to those who were looking at him; the audience as a whole was evidently not interested in organ music. In the gallery opposite him was stationed a full brass band, the members of which seemed entirely content to sit still and allow the audience and the organist to discourse whatever they pleased.
Meanwhile, over at Marquand Chapel, in the midst of a throng of those who could not get into Alexander Hall, and were compelled to see out of doors what they were destined to see, was gathering perhaps the largest company of eminent men that ever met together in one place. Here were the President and faculty of Princeton College and the presidents and portions of the faculties of many other colleges as well; here was the President of the United States with a military escort, and here were sixty-five of the most distinguished living scholars who were this day to honor and to be honored by receiving the first degrees conferred by Princeton University. And yet there was nothing in the atmosphere, or in the air of these men as they struggled to put on their robes, to indicate to a casual observer the quantity of greatness there assembled; it was merely a jolly company preparing to be dignified by and by; and even at their best, there was not one of them who could compare in dignity with any member of that military escort, the City Troop of Philadelphia. To observe the impassiveness, the air of utter unconsciousness with which one of those youthful but imposing soldiers sat his horse and gazed into space while a college classmate stood before his horse's nose, looked him over critically, and made facetious comments upon him as a work of art, was intensely amusing, and might have been even more so if one could have seen what was passing in the mind of the mounted man.
Before the old college clock struck eleven the procession was ready to move, the dismounted guard leading, the grand marshal and his baton next in order, then the President of the college and the President of the country, and then the gowned academicians two and two, a long, black, slow-moving line, except for the flashes of color almost painfully suggestive of that saddest of occasions, a college funeral. This was indeed the funeral procession of Princeton College, and the last hour had already struck. It was this thought that gave to this day a solemnity so unlike the spirit of the preceding one.
At Alexander Hall the guard halted. The black-robed ones passed on into the stone corridors like monks entering their cloister, threaded their way to the rear, and there entered what I may term the amphitheatre. At that instant there was a crash; the building was intact, but the band had waked up, and the or-