University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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THE BLUE AND GOLD Rather than let the name of Mistress Shipton fall into an almost merited oblivion on account of the miscarriage of her prognostication, we will endeavor to palliate the mistake of the old lady and help her out of her difficulty by suggesting for her benefit that in all probability she meant that this little world, this little college world of our Senior Class would come to an end in this most great and glorious Anno Domini. Yes. We have arrived at the last term of our series of trials, tribula- tions, joys and sorrows, and it is my duty as Historian to sum the same and give the result. We were the last specimen Freshman Class. A greenness tinged with boldness ; a deference to upper-classmen unalloyed with toadyism ; a vast propensity for beer and billiards, which however did not clash witli our duties as students ; a reverence for college customs, and an intense hatred for Bourdon. Such were our salient points as Fresh. Our Sophomore Year will live in American college lore. Ah! what a year was that, my friends. A perfect Olla Podrida, of bogus, grand juries, pistols, indignant faculties and similar parents, private detectives and sophomores conquered but not subdued. Our J unior Y ear was as mild and calm as a summer sea, and was passed chiefly in mourning for the flower of the class which the rude hand of the eradicating faculty had plucked from among us. Towards the middle of our Senior Year, when University life seemed to be perishing, we once more assumed the duties and responsibilities of a class union, and are gradually resuscitating the almost departed spirit of former days. It is the privilege of the venerable Senior to be retrospective. In such a spirit we often select some nice little freshman with a large bump of veneration, take him upon our knee like the good old grandfather of the famous Peterkin and Wilhelmine, and talk to him of the past glories of old Berkeley and the part which the noble Class of ' 81 played in it. We love to tell him, how four long, long years ago we came to Berkeley, when there were but two buildings, when the old pile of rocks with a nine points air of possession about them, usurped the position of right field upon the old campus. How Bachman ' s silvery hair was then jet black ; when the garrulous Littlejohn was unknown ; the time when the iron horse usurped the place of the spavined plug upon the horse cars. We delight in pointing out to him the old beach marks of Strawberry Creek, and descant upon the wonders of river erosion during our own geological epoch. How K. B. M., Sigma Delta Phi, E. G. S., the Oestrus, and the Besom all flourished. How the mathematical department sported six tutes. How Bourdon was buried, and about the magnificent, grand, oriental and unpaid bust afterwards. These things we tell him with a warm glow of pleasure, which we think is simply irresistible, but notwithstanding the poor little fellow often goes

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UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA the past year or two there has been a wide spread feeling of alarm as to the duration of the stability of this astronomical atom called the World ; owing to the fact that the venerable and some- what mythical Dame Shipton intimated in language which is plain that this mass of organized nebulae would resolve itself into sidereal chaos in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and eighty-one. However, the fears engendered by the predictions of this aged female, who in all probability was given to aerial locomotion, are gradually disappearing, chiefly due to the coldness of the cast-iron fact that Mother Earth still holds her own and prances round her elliptical course with her accustomed velocity and usual attraction, giving no other sign of dissolution than an occasional earthquake, a row in the faculty, or a rise in the price of billiards.

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA off and votes down a burial or a festivity, which his misguided and vandalic classmates pronounced hurtful to the fair name of the great U. C. We are the last of the old line of students. The class of students whom we mean reached their culmination a couple of years ago. Were it not for the fact that the geologist tells that when an order disappears it disappears forever, we would leave Berkeley with some hopeful feeling for its future welfare. But, alas ! the awful fate of the pre-historic trilobites tell us but too truly that such hopes are vain. The transition stage has already started in, and the future historian will record the fact that the true student passed out forever in the year 1881. GEORGE M. GUMMING, Class Historian.