"James McKeen of Londonderry was connected by marriage with James McGregor, the first minister of that town, who was a remarkable man. He was asked to leave his New Hampshire parish and go to the First Presbyterian Church in New York city. He declined. Londonderry was a more promising field for usefulness than New York. Londonderry has since succumbed. By the aid of the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, New York has gone ahead. "A traveller walking through Fifth Avenue and then through the roads of Londonderry can detect the superiority of New York with the naked eye. Unless Abbot Academy receive a larger and richer endowment than it now has, it will be to other institutions what the New Hampshire township is to the commercial emporium of our land. "Why not allow our academy to decline? What special reasons are there for giving a new impulse to it? We ask for our new buildings because our academy is the oldest incorporated institution in the land for the higher culture of young ladies exclusively. Its age gives it a title to support. The antiquity of a school is a rich treasure to it. Scores of matrons, teachers, missionaries, have been trained in this school, and have performed signal services in our Western settlements, in Constantinople, in Japan, and in other distant parts of the world. The affections of these pupils are still entwined around this ancient academy. Again, we need our new buildings as monuments to the past services of teachers who have adorned and honored the school. Their example of faithful work and of exemplary self-denial ought to receive a visible and fitting memorial. "Still another reason is that the endowment for which we ask will encourage future instructors to imitate the example of their predecessors. I have been conversant with many schools, I have not known one in which the principles of mental and moral philosophy, of the English and the Latin language, and of the fine arts have been more thoroughly and faithfully studied than in Abbot Academy. We do not expect there will ever be a theatre or an opera in the neighborhood of our academy; but we do expect that if we can obtain the pecuniary aid which we need, our school will be the resort of ladies who will devote themselves with zeal and care to the study of science, and more than all to the study of the word of God."