12                           Dorothy Ca?ifield Fisher

was one from Oxford (imagine the annoyance of the first-edition,
uncut-leaves fans). One of the pleasant memories of my girlhood
is the trip to England to see him, in a noble ceremony, wearing
his Oxford cap and great flaming scarlet gown, receive the degree
with a citation in sonorous Latin, praising him for his enthusiasm
for books as tools of students. I hope there are one or two still at
Columbia who can remember seeing the old librarian, his thick
white hair shining silver under his academic cap, the long scarlet
British cloak of antique cut billowing out in the American breeze
as, his black eyes shining, he stepped along in the academic
procession.

At the Sesqui-Centennial celebration of Columbia, I too
marched in that parade, my own hair gray by that time. A spirited
brass band preceded the long, colorful academic procession that
day, and I was glad to hear it tootling and banging away as en¬
thusiastically for those long-robed elderly workers in the field of
the intelligence as though we were athletes. I remembered well
that it had been one of my father's whimsically original ideas thus
to enliven academic marches. On the principle of Martin Luther's
objection to letting the devil have all the good tunes, he welcomed
everything that would make the life of the intelligence more
stirring to the imagination, more quickening to the heart of man.