the regular preparations ordered, a ceremony has sometimes taken place like the following.  The huge poker is heated in the old stove, and driven through the smoking volume, and the division, marshalled in line, for once at least see through the whole affair.  They then march over it in solemn procession, and are enabled, as they step firmly on its covers, to assert with truth that they have gone over it,—­poor jokes indeed, but sufficient to afford abundant laughter.  And then follow speeches, comical and pathetic, and shouting and merriment.  The night assigned having arrived, how carefully they assemble, all silent, at the place appointed.  Laid on its bier, covered with sable pall, and borne in solemn state, the corpse (i.e. the book) is carried with slow procession, with the moaning music of flutes and fifes, the screaming of fiddles, and the thumping and mumbling of a cracked drum, to the open grave or the funeral pyre.  A gleaming line of blazing torches and twinkling lanterns wave along the quiet streets and through the opened fields, and the snow creaks hoarsely under the tread of a hundred men.  They reach the scene, and a circle forms around the consecrated spot; if the ceremony is a burial, the defunct is laid all carefully in his grave, and then his friends celebrate in prose or verse his memory, his virtues, and his untimely end:  and three oboli are tossed into his tomb to satisfy the surly boatman of the Styx.  Lingeringly is the last look taken of the familiar countenance, as the procession passes slowly around the tomb; and the moaning is made,—­a sound of groans going up to the seventh heavens,—­and the earth is thrown in, and the headstone with epitaph placed duly to hallow the grave of the dead.  Or if, according to the custom of his native land, the body of Euclid is committed to the funeral flames, the pyre, duly prepared with combustibles, is made the centre of the ring; a ponderous jar of turpentine or whiskey is the fragrant incense, and as the lighted fire mounts up in the still night, and the alarm in the city sounds dim in the distance, the eulogium is spoken, and the memory of the illustrious dead honored; the urn receives the sacred ashes, which, borne in solemn procession, are placed in some conspicuous situation, or solemnly deposited in some fitting sarcophagus.  So the sport ends; a song, a loud hurrah, and the last jovial roysterer seeks short and profound slumber.”—­pp. 166-169.

The above was written in the year 1843.  That the interest in the observance of this custom at Yale College has not since that time diminished, may be inferred from the following account of the exercises of the Sophomore Class of 1850, on parting company with their old mathematical friend, given by a correspondent of the New York Tribune.