house on the hill and the genius who presides therein. There is the true corner stone of this government, and every department of our great University and educational system leads back to that source the little intellectual mill which boasts of no scythe chariots or war horses and no military equipment, beyond the fractional part of a brush broom in the hands of a pretty schoolmarm. She is to the University what the pellucid stream that trickles from the snows of the Rockies is to the Father of Waters. She it is who helps to govern this nation and is an auxiliary, if not the real president. As she sits there through study hours and gathers into her possession the barlow knives and tin whistles that will get between a boy and his books, she is a sort of secretary of the treasury. And when she keeps a couple of bellicose young Amercians in after school and piles brush on them in the old fashioned way, she is sort of a secretary of war. And when she intercepts the billet doux of some barefooted Romeo, as he shoots it across the room in a wad to his little pigeon-toed sweetheart, bearing a passionate and greasy avowal of what Sut Lovinggood calls "puppy love," she is a sort of postmaster general. An institution that can turn out produce of that type deserves and should have the undivided support of the entire population. With our beloved University as its capstone, our educational system is a grand and complete structure with the millions of acres of rich rolling grass lands of my part of the State for its foundation. Isaiah in a moment of inspiration said that "all flesh is grass." He had evidently reduced us beef eaters to our final analysis.

There is now no necessity, as long as the grass grows in the Panhandle, for any boy or girl to ever leave Texas for the purpose of higher education. It used to be the rule that a lot of agents would come down here every year, representing eastern schools, and like. cowboys riding the range, would round up a few double-decked sleeping cars full of our bright-eyed corn-fed Texas girls and take them back east to learn ballroom etiquette, handkerchief flirtation and the relative value of bonbons and gumdrops. And when their fathers had kept them there until they had become too poor to keep them longer, they were sent home graduates. Then, unless they happened to have enough intellectual vitality to recover, they spent the time until they got married doing fancy work, because they didn't fancy work. They would finally marry some spider-legged

dude, and with him for a husband and a pug dog to complete the family, they would proceed to enjoy married life until the divorce docket was taken up at a subsequent term of the court. Don't understand me to say that such was the invariable sequence of a boarding school life, because I know one who was strong enough to recover, and she is today reflecting credit on herself and my descendants. On her account I want to emphasize that this is not always the case, for indirectly or inversely, or perhaps more or sometimes less, as the case may be, and still she might or might not, according to whether she did or did not, but also if she did not do as I have described, yet I wouldn't be positive of anything which might be doubtful. I make that lucid statement in order that my position may be perfectly clear.

Now there is one thing certain, if my boy turns out to be a little chicken-headed cigarette sucker and spends his time prancing around to slobber swapping parties with some little old featherheaded gal, keeping his breath all stunk up with sen-sen, picking on a $3 mandolin with a splinter and singing, "Go tell the news to mother," then I am going to be so disgusted and so ashamed of him that in order to get him out of sight I will send him out of the State to school. Our alma mater could no more make a man out of such material than a hen could hatch out the Oriental Hotel by warming up a porcelain door knob.

Now, I haven't said that every boy and girl who couldn't make a creditable record in the classroom were being sent out of the State because their parents were ashamed of them, but I almost said it and I will let it stand that way.

If my boy has any of those elements lying under his hat, which with the proper training will make him a man instead of a thing, if he sprouts an individuality which seems likely to take root so that it cannot be whipped from its position by every wind of doctrine; if he displays any energy and hustling powers beyond an amount necessary to jump a board bill or nurse a Robert tail flush; if he is able to comprehend that it is not essential for some politicians to be honest in order to be successful; if he manifests sufficient tact to escape the enticements of a freckled face widow, or get a promise of a job from the weakest candidate in the race; if he can tell the difference between the ring of a counterfeit dollar and the music of the spheres; if he has brains enough to understand that no man

can serve two masters, without being arrested for bigamy, then I shall not be ashamed of him nor discouraged, and the finishing touches will be put to his education at some branch of our beloved alma mater.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS DAY.

[Address of Claude Weaver, LL. B., '87, at Dallas, October 21, 1899.]

Ladies and Gentlemen:-Grateful and deeply cherished is the summons which brings me from my Indian Territory home to participate in the celebration of "University of Texas Day."

It is perhaps fitting, that there should be here some representative of that Indian land across your northern border, for the Indian Territory is the foster child of Texas.

Texans dwell there by every green valley and every sparkling river. We love the beautiful land of our adoption, marvelous and matchless in its undeveloped resources, and lovelier than Eden in the morning of creation.

But I believe that "those hills are dearest which our childish feet have climbed the earliest ;" and while I am no longer a citizen of Texas, still my heart thrills with a strange pride in the presence of this great assembly, when I declare to you in the words of my father that, "My cradle was rocked on her daisy sprinkled bosom, her perfume laden winds piped the lullaby of my infancy, her fresh wild blossoms were the playthings of my childhood, her turf was my bed and her herbage my pillow ofttimes in the lone wandering of my youth, and when I sleep my last sleep, may her silken grasses and prairie flowers wave above my head."

This splendid exposition in the first city of this great State, is dedicated to the spirit of a commercial and utilitarian age.

It is an age that has for its maxim, "An aere in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia." But let us pause at the flood-tide of our material progress and industrial achievement.

Let us leave the mad currents of toil and trade.

Let us for one fleeting hour become again pilgrims to the Mecca of the Ideal and prophets of the Beautiful.

This is "University of Texas Day," set apart for the communion and literary festival of thinkers and of scholars, yea of all who love "The light that never was on land nor sea, the consecration and the poet's dream."

It has been my lot to travel much over this western country.

In the April of life and the morning of the year I have crossed yonder broad-breasted plains, spotted and starred with the snow and gold of the myriad wild flowers of the prodigal springtime, and arched by the unclouded blue of a southern firmament.

Beyond the Rio Grande, I have seen the aloes wave, and the "Grapes in bacchanal profusion reel to earth," in the land of the forgotten Aztec kings.

By the Pacific's wave worn shore, I have climbed the marbled step of Sutro Heights, and watched the white-winged wanderers of ocean sailing through the Golden Gate fade away in the red glow of the sunset.

Far in the lonely heart of the Colorado mountains, beneath the quaking aspens and the giant pines, in an atmosphere lulled by the murmur of the mountain stream, and sweet with the odors of the blue-bell and the columbine, the wild rose, the ox-eyed daisy, and the Mariposa lily, I have watched the purple twilight deepen into darkness, until the starry scarf of the milky way was thrown by the hand of God across the sky.

But never dawned upon my eyes a more delightful vision than that swarded hilltop in your beautiful capital city, where responsive to the cherished dreams of the fathers, your great University has risen to animate the hopes, to inspire the ambitions, to chasten the ideals, and to purify the lives of the sons and daughters of Texas, "To the last syllable of recorded time."

The conservative force of the Republic lies in its free schools and universities. In them, as in the fabled fountain of Ponce de Leon, she renews her youth forever.

I place the common schools first, because they are open alike to the children of the rich and the children of the poor.

For the law, "Like love and like death, levels all ranks, and lays the shepherd's crook beside the scepter."

By the public schools the seeds of knowledge are scattered broadcast, spread wide and far as the ashes of the martyred Wycliffe; that knowledge which ennobles labor by making it more skilful, which

peoples humble homes with happy dreams, which transforms the plain farmer from a peasant to a king, standing with no master where the apples in the orchard redden, or amid the white bells of the blowing clover.

But the University is the home and sanctuary of the scholar.

There he "Follows knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought." There, sweetened by invisible Castalian dews, genius unfolds the paradisiacal bloom of its amaranthine flower.

It is now more than twelve years since my brief student life in the University of Texas. The members of my class have met with varying and unequal fortune. Thinking of them, I recall the inexpressibly mournful lines from Byron's Siege of Corinth:

But some are dead and some are gone,

And some are scattered and alone,

And some are rebels on the hills

That look upon Epirus' valleys,

Where Freedom still at moments rallies

And pays in blood oppression's ills;

And some are in a far countree

And some all restlessly at home,

But never more, oh, never we

Shall meet to revel and to roam.

Some who were proud and brave as they unfurled the silken banner to life's battle on that rare June morning of long ago, have seen the word Victory blotted from the flag and Failure written there, a legend more terrible than that which startled Belshazzar's feast, or that which Dante read over the city of doom. Some have followed the baleful beacon of fame's glittering star, the false light of the Cornish wrecker, to learn that "The substance of ambition is but the shadow of a dream.”

Some in the midst of every worldly success have been haunted by unrealized ideals, and like Ixion in pursuit of the goddess, have clasped but a cloud to the cheated breast.

In vain they send Hope, a faint and weary diver, far away through the deeps of life's restless ocean in search of the priceless pearl of contentment. Others have solved the problem of life, in sweet and lowly pathways, in happy homes, where the air is stirred by the music of children's voices, and thrilled with the crooning love-song of a mother's lullaby.