Then the game—­and Yale wins.  The classes pour on the field in a stormy sea of color, and dance quadrilles, and form long lines hand in hand which sway and cross and play fantastically in a dizzying, tremendous jubilation which fills all of Yale Field.  The people standing up to go cannot go, but stay and watch them, these thousand children of many ages, this marvellous show of light-heartedness and loyalty.  Till at last the costumes drift together in platoons and disappear slowly; and the crowd thins and the last and most stirring act of the commencement-day drama is at hand.

It has come to be an institution that after the game the old graduates should go, class by class, to the house of the president of Yale, to renew allegiance.  It has come to be an institution that he, standing on the steps of his house, should make a short speech to each class.  The rainbow of men, sweeping gloriously down the city streets with their bands, dissolves into a whirlwind at the sight of that well-known, slight, dignified figure on the doorstep of the modest house—­this is a thing which one who has seen it does not forget; the three-minute speeches, each apt to its audience, each pointed with a dart straight to the heart of class pride and sentiment, these are a marvel.  Few men living could come out of a such a test creditably; only this master of men and of boys could do it as he does.  For each class goes away confident that the president at least shares its conviction that it is the best class ever graduated.  Life might well be worth living, it would seem, to a man who should hear every year hundreds of men’s voices thundering his name as these men behind the class banners.

Six weeks after the disaster of the Oriel mine it was commencement day in New Haven and Johnny McLean, his broken arm in a sling, a square of adhesive plaster on his forehead, was back for his Triennial.  He was mightily astonished at the greeting he got.  Classmates came up to him and shook his hand and said half a sentence and stopped, with an arm around his shoulder; people treated him in a remarkable way, as if he had done something unheard of.

It gratified him, after a fashion, yet it more than half annoyed him.  He mentioned over and over again in protest that he had done nothing which “every one of you fellows wouldn’t have done just the same,” but they laughed at that and stood staring in a most embarrassing way.

“Gosh, Johnny McLean,” Tim Erwin remarked finally, “wake up and hear the birdies sing.  Do you mean to tell me you don’t know you’re the hero of the whole blamed nation?”

And Johnny McLean turned scarlet and replied that he didn’t think it so particularly funny to guy a man who had attended strictly to his business, and walked off.  While Erwin and the others regarded him astounded.

“Well, if that isn’t too much!” gasped Tim.  “He actually doesn’t know!”

“He’s likely to find out before we get through,” Neddy Haines, of Denver, jerked out nasally and they laughed as if at a secret known together.