It was a very pleasant occasion when the Doctor brought Avis over to sit with us at the table where she used to stand and wait upon us.  We wondered how we could for a moment have questioned that she was one to be waited upon, and not made for the humble office which nevertheless she performed so cheerfully and so well.

   Commencements and other Celebrations, American and English.

The social habits of our people have undergone an immense change within the past half century, largely in consequence of the vast development of the means of intercourse between different neighborhoods.

Commencements, college gatherings of all kinds, church assemblages, school anniversaries, town centennials,—­all possible occasions for getting crowds together are made the most of. “’T is sixty years since,”—­and a good many years over,—­the time to which my memory extends.  The great days of the year were, Election,—­General Election on Wednesday, and Artillery Election on the Monday following, at which time lilacs were in bloom and ’lection buns were in order; Fourth of July, when strawberries were just going out; and Commencement, a grand time of feasting, fiddling, dancing, jollity, not to mention drunkenness and fighting, on the classic green of Cambridge.  This was the season of melons and peaches.  That is the way our boyhood chronicles events.  It was odd that the literary festival should be turned into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great occasion.  They had been so for generations, and it was only gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the decencies and solemnities of the present sober anniversary.

Nowadays our celebrations smack of the Sunday-school more than of the dancing-hall.  The aroma of the punch-bowl has given way to the milder flavor of lemonade and the cooling virtues of ice-cream.  A strawberry festival is about as far as the dissipation of our social gatherings ventures.  There was much that was objectionable in those swearing, drinking, fighting times, but they had a certain excitement for us boys of the years when the century was in its teens, which comes back to us not without its fascinations.  The days of total abstinence are a great improvement over those of unlicensed license, but there was a picturesque element about the rowdyism of our old Commencement days, which had a charm for the eye of boyhood.  My dear old friend,—­book-friend, I mean,—­whom I always called Daddy Gilpin (as I find Fitzgerald called Wordsworth, Daddy Wordsworth),—­my old friend Gilpin, I say, considered the donkey more picturesque in a landscape than the horse.  So a village fete as depicted by Teniers is more picturesque than a teetotal picnic or a Sabbath-school strawberry festival.  Let us be thankful that the vicious picturesque is only a remembrance, and the virtuous commonplace a reality of to-day.