In their halls I could not feel myself a stranger, and I resented the imputation of being a foreigner when I looked round upon the old portraits, all of whom were my countrymen as well as theirs, and some of whom had been among our founders and benefactors. In this year of reconciliations and atonements, too, the influence of college associations is of no secondary importance as a bond of union. On this day, in every State of our more than ever to be united country, there are men whose memories turn back tenderly and regretfully to those haunts of their early manhood. Our college also, stretching back as it does toward the past, and forward to an ever-expanding future, gives a sense of continuity which is some atonement for the brevity of life. These portraits that hang about us seem to make us contemporaries with generations that are gone, and the services we render her will make us in turn familiar to those who shall succeed us here. There is no way so cheap of buying what I may call a kind of mitigated immortality,--mean by that an immortality without the pains and penalty attached commonly to it, of being dug up once in fifty years to have your claims reconsidered [laughter]--as in giving something to the college. [Applause.] Nay, I will say in parenthesis, that even an intention to give it secures that place of which I have spoken. [Laughter.] I find in the records of the college an ancestor of my own recorded as having intended to give a piece of land. He remains there forever with his beneficent intention. It is not certain that he didn't carry it out. The land certainly never came to me, or I should make restitution. [Laughter and applause.] Consider, for example, William Pennoyer; how long ago would he have sunk in the tenacious ooze of oblivion, not leaving rack nor even rumor of himself behind. No portrait of him exists, and no living descendant, so far as I know, and yet his name is familiar with all of us who are familiar with the records of the college, and he always presents himself to our imaginations in the gracious attitude of putting his hand into his pocket. [Laughter.] And tell me, if you please, what widow of a London alderman ever insured her life with so sure return or perdurable interest as Madame Holden. Even the bodiless society, _pro propaganda fide,_ is reincorporated forever in the perpetuity of our gratitude. It is the genteelest of immortalities, as the auctioneer would call it, the immortality of perfect seclusion.