Visitors to Chautauqua in the centennial year beheld for the first time a structure which won fame from its inhabitants if not from its architecture. This was the Guest House, standing originally on the lake shore near the site of the present Men's Club building; though nobody remembers it by its official name, for it soon became known as "The Ark." No, gentle reader, the report is without foundation that this was the original vessel in which Noah traveled with his menagerie, and that after reposing on Mount Ararat it went adrift on Lake Chautauqua. "The Ark" was built to provide a comfortable home for the speakers and workers at the Assembly who for two years had been lodged in tents, like the Israelites in the Wilderness. It was a frame building of two stories, shingle-roofed, with external walls and internal partitions of tent-cloth. Each room opened upon a balcony, the stairs to the upper floor being on the outside and the entire front of each cell a curtain, which under a strong wind was wont to break loose, regardless of the condition of the people inside. After a few years a partition between two rooms at one end was taken down, a chimney and fireplace built, and the result was a living room where the arkites assembled around a fire and told stories. Ah, those _noctes ambrosianæ_ when Edward Everett Hale and Charles Barnard and Sherwin and the Beards narrated yarns and cracked jokes! Through the thin partitions of the bedrooms, every sneeze could be heard. The building was soon dubbed Noah's Ark, then "Knowers' Ark," from the varied learning of its indwellers; and sometimes from the reverberations sounding at night, "Snorers' Ark." Frank Beard was a little deaf, and was wont to sit at these _conversazioni_ in the parlor of the Ark with his hand held like an ear-trumpet. Mrs. Beard used to say that whenever she wished to hold a private conversation with him, they hired a boat and rowed out at least a mile from the shore. When the Assembly enlarged its boundaries by a purchase of land, the Ark was moved up to higher ground in the forest near where the Normal Hall now stands, and there served almost a generation of Chautauqua workers, until its frail materials were in danger of collapse, and it was taken down. Less famous buildings have been kept in memory by tablets and monuments; but it would require no small slab of marble to contain the names of the famous men and women who dwelt in that old Guest House; and what a book might have been made if some Boswell had kept the record of its stories and sayings! After spending two nights in the Ark, the Rev. Alfred Taylor's poetic muse was aroused to sing of the place and its occupants after this fashion: