Dr. Vincent did not change the restrictions, but he made them more endurable by the fresh interest he put into our lives. His effect on the community physically was immediate. It began to grow. The sound of the hammers nailing together the, for the most part, flimsy cottages was never still. The result was very like what Mark Twain found in the summer colony of Onteora in the Catskills in its first year—“the partitions so thin you can hear the women changing their minds.” Housekeeping improved. It had been as sketchy as the cottages—picnic housekeeping. You saw them at it, out in the rear of their cottages, over an old wood stove or stone fireplace, the men in their shirt sleeves, the women in big aprons, if not wrappers. Planks on sawhorses for tables, mats (we had not learned to say “doilies” yet), benches for seats. The natural practice of bringing discarded furniture from home to furnish the cottages led to the only distinctive piece of Chautauqua furniture I recall—a long high-backed bench made from an old-fashioned four-post bedstead. There were few garrets in all the country about Chautauqua that did not harbor one or more such bedsteads. They had been hidden away when families could afford the new-styled quartered-oak or walnut bedroom suites. Some ingenious mind had seen that by shortening the sidepieces of a four-poster to seat width, using the headboard for a back, you had a commodious and, with cushions, a comfortable seat, even couch. They were scattered all over the place. With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a Promenade along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed and plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in this front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent de luxe with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it. Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw Dr. or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George, we later learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper table as one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Sistie, Buzzie.” Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady improvement of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the people who came to teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new undertakings. He planned incessantly to stir not only our souls but our minds. We came to expect new ideas at each successive session and were never disappointed if sometimes a little bewildered. Behind all these various undertakings was the steadying hand of Lewis Miller, the silent partner, who had begun by spying out the land, establishing a community, laying the foundations for the Institution as it exists today—a center of democratic, Christian culture.