arted for the
chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample
yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to
the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago.

To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified
young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod-jumper like
myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a
neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his
offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came
to mean so much to me in after years.

It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian
columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on
the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I
was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this
splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity
which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me.

Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed,
white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old
pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence
that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was.
Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am
glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a
friend, and an almost infallible guide.

The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a
high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like
myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more
learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and
delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new
friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay
fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I
kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in
the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself.

It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section
of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these
"exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately
dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever
forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It
called for self-possessio