In the afternoon of commencement day there is a base-ball game at Yale Field.  To that the returning classes go in costume, mostly marching out afoot, each with its band of music, through the gay, dusty street, by the side of the gay, dusty street, by the side of the gay, crowded trolley-cars loaded to the last inch of the last step with a holiday crowd, good-natured, sympathetic, full of humor as an American crowd is always.  The men march laughing, talking, nodding to friends in the cars, in the motors, in the carriages which fly past them; the bands play; the houses are faced with people come to see the show.

The amphitheatre of Yale Field is packed with more than ten thousand.  The seniors are there with their mothers and fathers, their pretty little sisters and their proud little brothers—­the flower of the country.  One looks about and sees everywhere high-bred faces, strong faces, open-eyed, drinking in this extraordinary scene.  For there is nothing just like it elsewhere.  Across the field where hundreds of automobiles and carriages are drawn close—­beyond that is a gate-way, and through this, at three o’clock or so, comes pouring a rainbow.  A gigantic, light-filled, motion-swept rainbow of men.  The first rays of vivid color resolve into a hundred Japanese geishas; they come dancing, waving paper umbrellas down Yale Field; on their heels press Dutch kiddie, wooden-shod, in scarlet and white, with wigs of peroxide hair.  Then sailors, some of them twirling oars—­the famous victorious crew of fifteen years back; with these march a dozen lads from fourteen to eight, the sons of the class, sailor-clad too; up from their midst as they reach the centre of the field drifts a flight of blue balloons of all sizes.  Then come the men of twenty years ago stately in white gowns and mortar-boards; then the Triennials, with a class boy of two years, costumed in miniature and trundled in a go-cart by a nervous father.  The Highlanders stalk by to the skirl of bagpipes with their contingent of tall boys, the coming sons of Alma Mater.  The thirty-five-year graduates, eighty strong, the men who are handling the nation, wear a unanimous sudden growth of rolling gray beard.  Class after class they come, till over a thousand men have marched out to the music of bands, down Yale Field and past the great circle of the seats, and have settled in brilliant masses of color on the “bleachers.”  Then from across the field rise men’s voices singing.  They sing the college songs which their fathers sang, which their sons and great-grandsons will sing.  The rhythm rolls forward steadily in all those deep voices: 

“Nor time nor change can aught avail,” the words come,

“To break the friendships formed at Yale.”

There is many a breath caught in the crowded multitude to hear the men sing that.