do it; there is not one of you who would not be turned out of his father's door if he were thus to insult his mother.'' At this there came a round of applause. I then expressed my personal regret that the penalty must fall upon four men whom I greatly respected; but fall it must unless the offenders were manly enough to give themselves up. The result was that at the close I was greeted with a round of applause; and immediately afterward the four officers came to me, acknowledged the justice of the discipline, and expressed the hope that their suspension might not go beyond that term. It did not: at the close of the term they were allowed to return; and from that day ``mock programmes'' of the sort concerned, which in many American colleges had been a chronic evil, never reappeared at Cornell. The result of this action encouraged me greatly as to the reliance to be placed on the sense of justice in the great body of our students when directly and properly appealed to. Still another thing which I sought to promote was a reasonable devotion to athletics. My own experience as a member of a boating-club at Yale had shown me what could be done, and I think one of the best investments I ever made was in giving a racing-boat to the Cornell crew on Cayuga Lake. The fact that there were so many students trained sturdily in rural homes in the bracing air of western New York, who on every working-day of college life tramped up the University Hill, and on other days explored the neighboring hills and vales, gave us a body of men sure to do well as athletes. At their first contest with the other universities on the Connecticut River at Springfield they were beaten, but they took their defeat manfully. Some time after this, General Grant, then President of the United States, on his visit to the university, remarked to me that he saw the race at Springfield; that our young men ought to have won it; and that, in his opinion, they would have won it if they had not been unfortunately placed in shallow water, where there were eddies making against them. This remark struck me forcibly, coming as it did from one who had so keen a judgment in every sort of contest. I bore it in mind, and was not surprised when, a year or two later (1875), the Cornell crews, having met at Saratoga Lake the crews from Harvard, Yale, and other leading universities, won both the freshman and university races. It was humorously charged against me that when the news of this reached Ithaca I rang the university bells. This was not the fact. The simple truth was that, being in the midst of a body of students when the news came, and seeing them rush toward the bell-tower, I went with them to prevent injury to the bells by careless ringing; the ringing was done by them. I will not deny that the victory pleased me, as many others since gained by the Cornell crews have done; but far more to me than the victory itself was a letter written me by a prominent graduate of Princeton