So, illumined by crimson light and the flash of explosives which drowned, in continuous and hideous din, their own cheering and songs and the music of the band they had hired, the celebrants took their way by the houses of certain favored teachers to the hill where the bonfire was to be. At the houses the leaders throttled the disorderly racket, the crowd cheered, the teachers appeared, made their facetious speeches, and retired, the mob yelled applause, the hubbub broke forth again, the procession moved on. Many a wretched pun and poor, undignified joke was bitterly repented that night when Dr. X and Professor Z at last laid their weary heads to rest, longing to amend their remarks as the regretful congressman amends his faulty speech in the Record by striking out everything he has said and substituting something wholly different.
But the pith and marrow of the celebration was about the big bonfire on Jady hill, where proceedings might vary between the war dance of an Indian tribe and an open-air meeting of the Peace Society. The proper mean lay between these extremes of the extravagant and the tame, and Mr. Graham, by throwing responsibility on the older boys, by insisting that the festivity be public, and by taking a share in it himself, kept the merriment in bounds. To-night, after the individual members of the team had been cheered, the Principal set the pitch for the evening’s song of triumph in a brief, sensible speech; and Freund, captain of the team, followed with a disclaimer of personal desert and an eulogy on “the work of all the fellows,” delivered with proper modesty and the usual schoolboy lack of finish and superabundance of vigor. After Freund, Collins the trainer had his turn; but after expressing surprise and delight that the boys should have done so well, and declaring that he had known all along that they could do it, he struck hard on the irreconcilability of these statements, and went down in a burst of cordial applause. Then a friendly townsman of a humorous vein took a hand, and after the humorist, Mr. Lovering was demanded. The teacher had the advantage that jokes were not expected of him, so when he declared that “this is indeed a day on which the battle has been to the strong and the race to the swift,” the audience laughed in pleased surprise, and gave sympathetic hearing. The speaker then expressed the pleasure he had felt in seeing Strong win his two hard races, and passing from this naturally to the ban of probation and the fine way in which the runner had removed it, preached a neat little sermon of half-a-dozen sentences on the value of persistence and grit.