They come in droves.

Loud young women in long leather coats. A mother wrapped in a traditional Indian sari escorting her blue-jean-clad daughter. Tourists taking pictures. Parents leading their six-and 10-year-old children by the hand to show them what a presigious university is really like.

April is the busiest month of the year for University tour guides, as throngs of recently-admitted prefrosh join the usual tourist crowd to get a glimpse of the college where they might--or might not--decide to spend their next four years.

And while the tours go on all year long, the ones in April have a different edge to them. These are high school students who have already leapt over the first hurdle of admissions and are now choosing whether they really want to attend Harvard.

It is a buyer's market, and among the top salespeople are the undergraduate tour guides in the Crimson Key Society.

The aim of Crimson Key is to present Harvard: architecturally, academically, anecdotally and socially. Students and parents, domestic and international tourists alike, are given almost identical tours. During an hour-long stroll around campus, the guides point out historic buildings and statues, discuss admissions criteria and academic standards and highlight extracurricular organizations.

"Our primary responsibility is to dispell all myths about Harvard," says tour guide Allison Hecht '91. "We want to show that Harvard is a school of people who get educated. Any stories we tell show tradition, not elitism."

Typically, the tours are geared toward displaying the landmarks of Harvard. A tourist haven, the University draws crowds of business people and international visitors as frequently as interested students.

But cute stories and apocryphal anecdotes are also a mainstay of the tours. Harvard mythology is an integral part of what the tour guides dispense, and each stop along the way marks another landmark where someone famous did something fascinating.

First stop: Harvard Hall, where the tour guide tells the oftrepeated story of the student who stole a book from the collection of John Harvard's books housed in the building.

As the story goes, that night Harvard Hall burned down, and the student realized he held the last rare book in John Harvard's collection. When he strutted into the president's office the next morning, he was thanked for the book, but expelled for stealing it from the library.

There is a story for every stop: the statue of three lies, the stipulations on Widener library, the butter pads on the ceiling of the Harvard Union. Most of tales elicit "oohs" and "ahs"--and occasional chuckles--from the people on the tour.

Passers-by, most of them undergraduates, tend to smirk knowingly. But it's a bright spring day, and the combination of landmarks and legends seems to have the desired effect on the visitors. Touring students are often visibly awed, walking around the Yard with their mouths open or their heads cocked back.

In front of Emerson Hall, one guide tells a story--one of the tour's staples--about another spring day when Gertrude Stein was taking a philosophy exam in a class taught by William James. Legend has it that Stein wrote on the top of the exam that she couldn't bear to take a test on such a beautiful day, and that she was going outside. James gave her an A, saying that she truly understood the meaning of philosophy.

"Do you hear who went here?" a mother whispers loudly to her son, as she hear the story. He is hunched over, hands in pockets, seeming unimpressed. "Do you realize who your professors would be?"