May

What time the vernal lawns are shaved and rolled, and school grounds become drenched in sunshine and bird song, studying in books and teaching out of them become burdensome. At young ladies' seminaries and colleges, undergraduates then have dreams and ideas more mature than the oldest wight on earth, and their greying mistresses are stirred by impulses of an age with the buds outside the window. Wherefore an old pagan custom is then revived, its original nature made innocent by thousands of springs. The Maypole is erected. Virgins dance in white fluttering things. A Queen of the May or of Beauty is crowned with a garland. Or a play of long ago is acted out in some bower where

No daintie flowre or herbe that

growes on grownd,

No arborett with painted blossoms drest

And smelling sweete, but there it

might be fownd

To bud out faire, and throwe her

sweete smels al arownd.

So it was, last week, at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Mass.). The young ladies performed a pageant adapted from The Faerie Queen,* that poetic conceit of a "sweet wit and pretty invention" which young Edmund Spenser wrote to flatter Queen Elizabeth while he was helping to pacify her province of Ireland. Miss Lorraine Keck galloped right nobly as the Red Cross Knight to rescue pretty Helen Howard (Una) from the unspeakable machinations of Ivy Trace (Archimago) and her vicious minions. "Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound," the college musicians rendering appropriate strains from Meyerbeer, Gounod, Arens, Liszt or Wagner.

One and all voted it quite the most beautiful and elaborate May pageant ever held at Mount Holyoke, and doubtless it outshone many a similar affair elsewhere in the land, for Mount Holyoke had outdone herself to observe the 25th anniversary in office of her celebrated President, Dr. Mary Emma Woolley.

It is really 26 years since the young woman then at the head of Wellesley College's department of Biblical history and literature was called to South Hadley. She was a Connecticut girl who, after teaching at Wheaton Seminary, had fitted herself for collegiate teaching by five years' study at Brown University. How active she has been during the past quarter century outside the walls of Mount Holyoke, as well as within them, may be judged from the astonishing list of national committees, boards and trusteeships listed solidly under her name for the better part of a column in Who's Who--prominent positions in Phi Beta Kappa, the Y. W. C. A., the College Entrance Examination Board, the Association of University Women, the Hall of Fame electorate, the League of Women Voters, bodies to foster peace and the League of Nations, charities, colleges in foreign lands, legislative, educational, religious, press and occupational societies--every sort of position, in short, for which there is sought a distinguished woman of high intelligence. And all these posts and duties have not kept her too busy to write articles on education and historical monographs--The Early History of the Colonial Post Office; The Development of the Love of Romantic Scenery in America.

*Identified last week by the erudite New York Times as "an old English poem."