Men's Christian Association was already negotiating for the purchase of a site, and named half a dozen available locations. The denial which the managing editor, with some chagrin, agreed to print next day never quite offset the first error.

A prominent resident who might have contributed handsomely was afterward introduced to an Association secretary.

"Oh, yes," said he, "I see by the paper 'you're goin' to put up an Association here." In answer to the denial he only said:

Well, we had one of them Associations here ten year ago, an' I think it didn't pan out very well." It was a very difficult matter to explain to this man the wonderful not to say marvelous-change through which the Association has gone during the past ten years.

The campaign included half a dozen neighboring towns, whose newspapers gave the Convention more publicity than those of the Convention city itself. One manufacturing city of ten thousand had the enterprise to send a delegation of a dozen representative business men to ask for the Convention the next year. These cities knew more about the Association and accorded its secretaries a heartier reception than the Convention city.

In the matter of funds to defray the general Convention expense, the local " corresponding " member found a large opposition. But this opposition was found to be less than that of the housewives who did not want to be "bothered with strange men in the house overnight," and who had been looked to to furnish accommodations for a large share of the delegates.

Business and professional men offered a most peculiar objection, one which was not a little amusing. Years before there had been a land-selling scheme for locating a number of factories. Residents, for once in their lives, waxed enthusiastic over the prospect of making their city one of the largest manufacturing centers in the State. A fund of some $400,000 was subscribed for several hundred acres for factory sites, and the promoters set to work to secure the industries. Seven factories were secured. Two of these were in a bankrupt condition when they came, and failed, despite a deal of local bolstering. Within a year two more failed, so that the plan fell through, and investors are still trying to get their money out of the land they bought.

This incident would seem wholly discon

nected with an Association movement, yet the reader has no idea how many times it was brought out of the closet, as if the Young Men's Christian Association were a similar sort of doubtful enterprise. It was used as quite a satisfactory excuse.

The land-selling scheme had been followed by a "wet" and "dry" campaign, in which the saloons first lost and then won. This fight had separated the newspapers. It also seemed to be within the human order of things that members of one faction should not assist members of the other faction, despite anything for the public weal which might be contained in the move.

It was found useless to object to the treatment accorded Association news, but it was always interesting, if patience lingered, to get at the causes.

"There are men mixed up in this thing who are absolutely objectionable to a majority of the people," was one newspaper editor's reason for refusing to print Association news. One man, he said, was a rank Prohibitionist, another was a crook, another a political demagogue, a fourth ought to be in the penitentiary, and a fifth was "hooked up " with that land deal.

"If any of these fellows started out to raise money for a Young Men's Christian Association, do you know what we'd do?" he We'd simply sit back and hoot at

asked.

'em."

66

"But this is not a private enterprise," it was objected. "No one is making any money out of it but the city itself—the young men and boys who need it."

It

"Do you suppose I'd give a red penny to any enterprise or organization that those five fellows were connected with? Not on your life!" he exclaimed with some heat and an air of finality that closed the incident. reminded the secretary of a young schoolmate who once made the heroic declaration before his fellows that, "if they thought he was going to study for old Teacher So-and-So, they were mighty much mistaken!" These crooks and demagogues on the committees were guilty of being good business men, good lodge members, and regular church attendants, all vitally interested in the welfare of their sons and daughters.

opticon lecture-always a convincing argument. A blind man could have seen the change in attitude as it crept over many of those business men. It certainly made the secretaries' hearts glad to see it. The account of this dinner and of a meeting at one of the churches the same evening was spread out over two pages of the twelve-page paper the next day.

The last day of the Convention (Sunday) was filled with meetings. A college president addressed a meeting of 2,500 men and boys in the opera-house, an attendance far beyond estimates of a week before. The managing editor of the afternoon paperthe most rabid opponent encountered-was there, and listened to a wonderful appeal to men with tears in his steel-gray eyes. As he left the meeting he said to the press secretary:

"I'd like to have two or three columns of this speech and meeting and a half-column editorial to-morrow morning, if you can get it to me by ten o'clock." The news and editorial copy was there in ample time, and was used in full.

The morning paper printed nearly five columns of news matter with half a dozen cuts, and commended the movement editorially. An incident which warmed the heart of the secretary occurred during the stress of getting out that Monday morning story in the newspaper office. It made him feel, in fact, that all .he had gone through was perhaps. worth while, after all.

"I've

"I want to apologize to you for my attitude in this thing," said the managing editor, stopping in the midst of his work. been wrong most of the time, and I don't want you to go away from here thinking that I'm what I seem to be.

"I had no idea that the Young Men's Christian Association was the systematic business organization I have found it to be. That glimpse yesterday, and again to-day, gave me a new outlook. Why, you have every department running just like clockwork and every man in his place. I never saw anything so smooth as this Convention has been. So far as I could see, there hasn't been a ripple. I'm proud to know you fellows. I I hope you'll have occasion to come back here again some time in the near future. In the meantime, you can rely on this sheet. doing some real boosting."

There has not yet been any concerted effort to establish an Association in a building in this city. Perhaps the time is not ripe for

such a move. But the employed secretaries, the men 66 on the firing line," who fought their way through that hostile public sentiment, are confident that one day the seed

they planted among the rocks and thorns will sprout into an Association plant, fully organized and completely equipped by "members of the opposition."

A

RECENT writer in The Outlook has said that the only really convincing proof of immortality is the consciousness that the thoughts and feelings and experiences of our lives are concerned with things which are eternal. This is profoundly true, and is surely one of the most significant things that has ever been said upon the subject. Perhaps the thought of this writer may be carried a step further. Is not immortality, after all, primarily a matter of the quality of a life rather than of its duration? The existence of a moth prolonged forever would not be an immortal life. A life that in its aspirations, its sympathies, its longings, touches the fundamental currents of life, touches God, is already eternal. The mere desire for continued existence has little significance. We all know that the .material atoms that make up our bodies will live again in myriad forms of variety and beauty. There is no comfort in that fact to the heart that longs for eternal life. Merely to add year upon year of new experiences to a life finite in its scope, finite in its imaginative reach, finite in the range of its ideas, would have value, but not the kind of value that constitutes genuine immortality. An immortal life is a different kind of a life from a mortal one. Every moment of it is lived, to use that grand old phrase of Spinoza's, "under the form of eternity," "sub specie æternitatis." Eternal life is as different from finite life as light from darkness, as harmony from discord, as the Sistine Madonna from the daubs upon a painter's palette. To-day, in an immortal life, is radiant with significance, radiant with prophecy. To-day, in an immortal life, is

illuminated by "the light that never was on sea or land." The medieval painters loved to paint the Christ, or God, as sending forth light upon all around. The symbolism is true as well as beautiful. The element of the divine within us, the consciousness of this divine element, is what constitutes immortality.

As immortality has to do primarily with the kind of life, and not the length of life, it has many degrees. It seems strange, but it is none the less true, that to-day may be more or less immortal, more or less eternal. Real immortality is an achievement, and it cannot be altogether attained at once. Just as the fragile acorn sends its tendrils this way and that, penetrating deeper and deeper and wider and wider, until finally it is rooted firmly in its native soil and grows into majestic and enduring strength, so the soul may root itself little by little in God, its native dwelling-place, until it grows to the majesty of an immortal life.

The immortal life does not consist in rapt contemplation or adoration of God. It is dynamic. It is a life, not a state. It is a vital, creative energy, not a mere way of thinking and feeling. As gravitation binds the smallest clod to the most distant stars, so the immortal life connects the soul with all that lives. Love is its essence. In dynamic, creative love the soul realizes its immortality.

Love, like gravitation, has many homely tasks to perform. But the homeliest task it

can illumine with an eternal radiance. In washing another's feet, or in giving a cup of cold water, life finds present immortality.

grassy depression as easily followed now as when it was studded with the carts, prairieschooners, and bull trains of the gold-seekers of 1849 and 1850. There are places where even the meager Escalante trail may be traced. These also are comparatively recent examples, but much older ones are not hard to find.

Some years ago the Spectator spent a little time in Surrey, England. There, not far from Coulsden Common, a double row of gnarled and storm-bent yews attracted his eye, and closer attention noted others continuing at irregular intervals a line which here and there had a curiously terraced appearance on the hillsides. He believed that these were indications of an abandoned roadway of great age, and further study convinced him that it marked the course of the great Pilgrim Road from the west to Canterbury. Later, in Sussex, one of the longestcivilized parts of England, he wandered along narrow, sloping roads sunken sometimes twelve or fifteen feet deep between mossy walls of chalky or stiff clay little disposed to wash down or cave in, while trees and bushes, rooted on the summits (the country level) on each side, overhung like the roof of a verdant tunnel. It was plain that these deeply trenched roads had not been purposely dug, but were the result of eenturies of travel by pack-horses and carts, which had worn them down wherever a slope allowed the dust to be washed and blown away.

And this brings us back to the Gully Road and shows why it has come to be so calledhas come, for it is only latterly that it has acquired the character of a ravine. It crosses a low wooded ridge, the summit of which is tough gravel, but the slopes of which are of looser soil -that fertile till which lay on the safe northern side of the great glacial, moraine which is Long Island, and never was washed and reassorted by the ocean as the south side has been. It is doubtful whether the forefathers found it needful, considering the then high level of the connecting road westward, to make any cutting at all on the hill, except possibly at a sort of shoulder where terraces on each side as high as one's head show what seems to be the original level. The rear of a disused barn, now held together only by the crisp pea-green and gray lichens and moss on its ashy, worm-eaten old boards, where the wasps come to get paper material for their nests and the flickers hammer in pure enjoyment of the hollow racket they can make those boards come down to foundations on this terrace. This sounds very archæological, but it is only circumstantial history. When

the post-road was diverted to the new harbor and shore road, and steadily graded down to suit the advancing "improvements," this old piece over Briar Hill was left as a useless relic, of service only to a few as a wood-road or a cutoff, and was no longer cared for. At oncefor Nature is ever on the watch to reclaim ground lost for a time to man's dominationsun and frost and rain began their replevin. The light soil, disturbed along the single wheeltrack, was swept down by wind and water until a narrow gully has been aggraded, hardly half as wide as the original road, and ten feet deep in places.

It is so narrow because a rank vegetation of trees and shrubs and herbage long ago took possession of the high neglected borders and protected them against washing, except in the central track at the bottom. This tangled borderage, rising steeply on each side and shaded by outreaching tree-tops, makes the Gully Road a beautiful place in summer. Nowhere in early spring does the local naturalist find pleasanter promises of reawakening life. Here, sheltered from the winds, gather juncos, whitethroats, and fox-sparrows-finest of their race, and seeming proudly conscious of their beauty; while songsparrows and Canada sparrows carol in rivalry overhead or join their larger fellows and the goldfinches and towhees in their feast upon the berries and seeds still so abundant in the thickets below. Later the gully becomes a gallery of color and music, and a rich field for the insecthunter.

The banks are indeed perfect little Northern jungles. A score of different trees may be

catalogued. The ancient high borders are defined by rows of gale-torn cedars and cherry trees annually producing bushels of fruit for the benefit of innumerable squirrels, robins, cedarbirds, blue jays, and what-not; while in May masses of dogwood bloom light up the densely mingled foliage that struggles eagerly out toward light and air. Underneath, of course, is an impenetrable tangle of vines and low scrub, silvery green ropes of catbrier, knotted threads of grape and ampelopsis, content to creep where they cannot climb, and fuzzy chains of poison ivy crowding in everywhere among the good plants like-well, find your own moral simile! Blackberries and raspberries strive to outdo even the smilax in prickly vigor. And over all, in this late summertime, spreads a veiling network of wild buckwheat, making the most of a brief life. As for the weeds, well, what are there not in this collection, from the miserable ragweed which kills off the grass to the tall, swaying sow-thistle that invites the slash of a stick to cut down its weak and ugly impudence? Here thrive the feathery yarrow, the exquisite cassia which meekly folds its rows of leaflets if you speak to it harshly, velvety mulleins, primroses, bouquets of goldenrod as big as barrels, and a carpet of pretty little flowering plants, most of which bloom by English roadsides just as they do in this land to which their seeds were brought long ago.

The "human interest" in this so charming bit of secluded old road centers in a shanty half up the slope, where is manifested neglect and degradation of its own kind; but that is "another story."

A PIONEER WOMAN'S COLLEGE

In Dr. Abbott's most interesting article "Democracy in Education," published in The Outlook of August 10, it is stated that girls were not admitted to any of the colleges before 1850. But Oberlin in 1833 admitted women on the same terms as men. And as far back as 1830, under the patronage of President Bishop, of Miami University, and two of his professors, McGuffey and Scott, the latter the father-in-law of President Harrison, a school was founded for the higher education of women in Oxford, Ohio, with Miss Bethania Crocker, the daughter of a Massachusetts clergyman, in charge. In three or four years she married the son of President Bishop, and the Misses Smith and Clark, one of them being the sister-in-law of Henry

Ward Beecher, became principals. In 1839 this school was formally chartered by special act of the Ohio Legislature. A regular cottage system for boarding pupils from a distance had been established for several years. Mr. Harry Lewis, the uncle, I think, of Mrs. Philip Moore, had in his own home several of those boarding pupils. In 1849 the Oxford Female Institute was chartered by special act of the Ohio Legislature and the property of the Academy was turned over to this institution. In 1855-6 a handsome building in the east part of the village was dedicated for the Oxford Female College, another institution started under the auspices of the old school Presbyterian Church. In 1867 these colleges for girls were formally united by purchase. From their incipiency, the schools had the avowed purpose of offering to