"It is one of those days when chickens run around the barn-yards with open beaks and distended wings; when shirt-collars have a decidedly despairing look, and when their owners eddy into every room which displays the sign ‘Ice Cream’ or ‘Soda Water with choice Syrups,’ as instinctively as chips or leaves seek out every nook along the brook side. … the temperature was up to the melting point during the continuance of the exercises, and it was not at all to be wondered at that President McLean should have found his silk gown so uncomfortably warm that he slipped it off his shoulders at every convenient opportunity; that fat men should have put on an air strongly suggestive of SIDNEY SMITH’s receipt for keeping cool on a warm Summer’s day,--to take off your flesh and sit in your bones;--nor finally was it at all surprising that young ladies should have found it a great more comfortable to talk to their neighbor than to listen to dry disquisitions from the stage, until President MACLEAN felt called upon to administer them a severe rebuke for their want of attention."
--New York Times, June 30, 1859, reporting on Princeton's Commencement