Nor was this variety of "time, times, and half-time" all the drawbacks. When news came that an excursion train was due from Buffalo, every steamboat on the lake would ignore its time-table and the needs of the travelers; and all would be bunched at the Mayville dock and around it to catch the passengers. Or it might be a similar but more tangled crowd of boats in the Outlet at Jamestown to meet a special train from Pittsburgh. Haven't I seen a bishop on the Fair Point pier, who _must_ get the train at Lakewood to meet his conference in Colorado, scanning the landscape with not a boat in sight, all piled up three miles away? [Illustration: Palestine Park, Looking North Dead Sea in foreground: Mount Hermon in distance] [Illustration: Tent-Life in 1875 J. L. Hurlbut, J. A. Worden, Frank Beard, J. L. Hughes] Nor were the arrangements for freight and baggage in those early years any more systematic than those for transportation. Although Chautauqua Lake is on the direct line of travel east and west, between New York and Chicago, and north and south between Buffalo and Pittsburgh, Fair Point, the seat of the Assembly, was not a railroad station. Luggage could be checked only to Jamestown, Lakewood, or Mayville, and thence must be sent by boat. Its destination might be indicated by a tag or a chalk mark, or it might remain unmarked. Imagine a steamer deck piled high with trunks, valises, bundles of blankets, furniture, tent equipment, and things miscellaneous, stopping at a dozen points along the lake to have its cargo assorted and put ashore--is it strange that some baggage was left at the wrong place, and its owner wandered around looking vainly for his property? One man remarked that the only way to be sure of your trunk was to sit on it; but what if your trunk was on the top or at the bottom of a pile ten feet high? Considering all the difficulties and discomforts of those early days--travel, baggage, no hotels nor boarding houses, a crowded dining hall with a hungry procession outside perhaps in the rain waiting for seats at the tables, the food itself none of the best--it is surprising that some thousands of people not only found the Assembly, but stayed to its conclusion, were happy in it, lived in an enchanted land for a fortnight, and resolved to return the very next year! More than this, they carried its enthusiasm and its ideals home with them and in hundreds of places far apart, the Sunday Schools began to assume a new and higher life. Some time after this, but still early in Chautauqua's history, a prominent Sunday School man expressed to the writer his opinion that "people who came home from Chautauqua became either a mighty help or a mighty nuisance. They brought with them more new ideas than could be put into operation in ten years; and if they couldn't get them, one and all, adopted at once they kicked and growled incessantly."