The only way to keep the university safe was to make it Mrs. Stanford’s personal property; all the professors were listed as her private servants—a device which some other presidents of universities might be interested to make note of! For years the institution was supported from Mrs. Stanford’s income, eked out by the occasional selling of a racehorse. The job of running a university and a racing stable in combination offered a diversified task for the widow of a railroad king and a specialist in ichthyology. The senator had been offered a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for “Palo Alto,” a prize stallion; the offer was refused—and next year the stallion died! The university owned a fourth interest in the Central Pacific Railroad, now a portion of the Southern Pacific; the other fourths were owned by the Crocker estate, the Hopkins estate, and Collis P. Huntington, the prize grabber of them all, who resented the university as an insult to his lack of culture. He would “stop that circus some day,” he used to say; describing it as “putting a two thousand dollar education into a two hundred dollar boy.” Some years previously he had proposed that in order to determine the value of the Central Pacific stock, each of the four holders should put some of it on the market; this was done, and Huntington secretly bought it all, and then turned Stanford out and had himself made president of the road. Dr. Jordan described Huntington’s motto as: “Anything is mine that is not nailed down, and nothing is nailed that I can pry loose.” After Stanford’s death he tried to buy the university holdings in the railroad for three million dollars; but the university held on—and had better luck than Johns Hopkins University, which was left a big block of Baltimore and Ohio stock by its founder, and was frozen out by the big fellows, and did not get a dollar. Ultimately the Stanford stock was sold to James Speyer for sixteen millions. Many and curious were the efforts made to get Mrs. Stanford’s money away from her university. A preacher came and delivered a sermon about her dead boy, in which he compared him to the youthful Jesus Christ—but he did not get her millions for Methodism! The Catholics came, and they deeply impressed the old lady’s failing mind with their bells and incense and colored lights—but they did not persuade her to move the Stanford girl-students to their school at Menlo Park! Bearing in mind these tragedies averted, we may forgive our ichthyological diplomat for some of the minor atrocities which he was unable to avert: for example, the great bronze statue of Senator Stanford, with his wife and son kneeling dutifully at his feet. This group is known to the irreverent students as the “Holy Trinity,” and it used to stand in the middle of the campus; but the elements were also irreverent, and so it has been moved indoors, and fills the rotunda of the museum.