The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert. Doves, whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under leaves of grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover bloom in red and white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with honey swarm and flit in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in soft whirls and stand to sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves of growing corn. Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less satyr and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where some fallen cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts his buried shagbarks. There “life is sweet, brother. There’s day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things. There’s likewise a wind on the heath.” They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent ether. They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts in summer so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the recess of branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky trees, while slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the earth, murmur in antiphonal chorus. And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces of light upon our earth awhirl in the dear God’s Arms. * * * * * The West is large. That which would be true of a university in one part of its broad expanse might not be true of another institution of like foundation some distance away. And what might be said of a college or university independent of politics, would in nowise be averable of one pretty well controlled by that perplexing monitor. Again, a fact which might be asserted of a college built up by some religious denomination might be radically false if claimed for one supported by the taxpayers of a great commonwealth, and hedged by sentiment and statute from the predominance of any ecclesiasticism. You speak of the general characteristics of the University of Michigan, but these characteristics are not true of the little college down in Missouri, or Kentucky, or Ohio. Neither would the facts of life in some institutions in Chicago be at one with those of a thriving school where conditions are markedly kleinstädtisch. In speaking of the West we must realize its vast territory and the varying characteristics of its people. Of what is here set down I am positive of its entire truth only so far as one institution is concerned, namely, the titulary--that is, the University of Hesperus--which recalleth the city bespoken in the Gospel according to Matthew--that it is set upon a hill and cannot be hid. TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS There was never in any age more money stirring, nor never more stir to get money. “The Great Frost of January, 1608”