The Press Board, organized by this official reporter, consists of seven students reporting for Boston papers and two for those in New York. At the time of the Wellesley fire, this board proved itself particularly efficient in disseminating accurate information.
V.
But it is not the workaday Wellesley, tranquilly pursuing her serious and semi-serious occupations, that the outsiders know best. To them, she is wont to turn her holiday face. And no college plays with more zest than Wellesley. Perhaps because no college ever had such a perfect playground. Every hill and grove and hollow of the beautiful campus holds its memories of playdays and midsummer nights.
Those were the nights when Rosalind and Orlando wandered out of Arden into a New England moonlight; when flitting Ariel forsook Prospero's isle to make his nest in Wellesley's bowering rhododendrons --in blossom time he is always hovering there, a winged bloom, for eyes that are not holden. Those were the nights when Puck came dancing up from Tupelo with Titania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught, cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their passion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and argued of love with Aucassin. Those were the nights when the Countess Cathleen--loveliest of Yeats's Irish ladies--found Paradise and the Heavenly Host awaiting her on a Wellesley hilltop when she had sold her soul to feed her starving peasants.
But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads 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 speech.... And then it was there was introduced the more questionable practice of planting class trees too delicate to bear the college course. Although a foolish little bird built her nest and laid her eggs in the golden-leaved evergreen of '79, and although a much handsomer nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks."
The true story of the Wellesley spade and how it came to be handed down from class to class, is recorded in Florence Morse Kingsley's diary, where we learn how the "burly instrument" of 1877 was succeeded by a less unwieldy and more ladylike utensil. Under the date, April 3, 1878, we find:
Our class (the class of '81) had a meeting last night.
We held it in one of the laboratories on the fifth floor, quite in secret, for we didn't want the '80 girls to find it out. The class of '80 is thought to be extraordinarily brilliant, and they certainly do look down on us freshmen in haughty disdain as being correspondingly stupid. I don't say very much against them, since I____ is an '80 girl: besides, if l work hard I can graduate with '80, but at present my lot is cast with '81. We have decided to have a tree planting, and it is to be entirely original and the first of a series.
