One of Brother Van’s enterprises seemed not to be of God’s planning. That was the original home of Montana Wesleyan, five miles from Helena. People spoke of the neglected building as a mistake and an expensive failure. Boys threw stones through every pane of glass in the three-story building. A family of lively coyotes occupied the big dining-room; bats took up their abode in the dark corners; spiders spun their webs unhindered over the ceiling, and owls seemingly joined the scoffers in their derision of the enterprise. Occasionally a solitary figure would come into the building and kneeling in the dust, would implore God to give him a reason against the prevalent unbelief. He would ask God to use these buildings for his own service, and for the Christian uplift of young people. Surely there was some use for them. The years passed, and this solitary figure began to see another need for his cherished Montana. The young people had long since been coming to the university on Capitol Hill, but in the wide expanses of the state there were yet many children unschooled. There were orphans to be protected, and other children too far from the district school for daily attendance. These became a new and dear care to Brother Van. Illustration: THE VAN ORSDEL HOME FOR NURSES IS ONE OF THE MANY INSTITUTIONS FOUNDED BY BROTHER VAN Again the old pocketbook made a beginning. As the hard-earned money went for the house-cleaning a gift came to Brother Van; a grateful ranchman presented him with a cow. It was driven promptly to the two hundred-and-thirty-five-acre campus which surrounded the neglected building out by Helena, so that the few children he might gather there should be fed. The building, so recently the home of the bats and the coyotes, was cleaned and repaired and put in readiness for its first pupil, a child whom a dying mother committed to the care of Brother Van. Others needing school advantages were found and placed in the renovated building. The title page of the first _Annual_ published by the students of this school of faith is inscribed: “To Brother Van as an expression of love from the class of 1915.” Not all the time was Brother Van building churches. There are one hundred churches in Montana built by him, and about fifty parsonages due to his labors, besides six hospitals and two large institutions of learning, but there is another piece of work which he has been doing between times for the church he loves. Since 1876 he has represented the Methodist Church of Montana in the denomination’s great governing body, the General Conference. At the meeting at Saratoga Springs in 1916, one evening was given over to the two friends, Dr. Thomas C. Iliff and Brother Van. They recounted the struggles and triumphs of their western life, and sang the old songs which had carried inspiration to the people of the west.