DURING those early years the Chautauqua sessions were strenuous weeks to both Miller and Vincent. Mr. Miller brought to Chautauqua for a number of seasons his normal class of young people from the Akron Sunday School, requiring them to attend the Chautauqua normal class and to take its examination. He acted also as Superintendent of the Assembly Sunday School, which was like organizing a new school of fifteen hundred members every Sunday, on account of the constant coming and going of students and teachers. But Mr. Miller's time and thoughts were so constantly taken up with secular details, leasing lots, cutting down trees, and setting up tents, settling disputes with lot holders and ticket holders, and a thousand and one business matters great and small--especially after successive purchases had more than doubled the territory of the Assembly,--that he was able to take part in but few of its exercises. One out of many perplexing situations may be taken as a specimen. In one purchase was included a small tract on the lake-shore outside the original camp ground, where some families from a distance had purchased holdings and built small cottages, being independent both of the camp-meeting and the Assembly. Some members of this colony claimed the right of way to go in and out of the Assembly at all times, Sundays as well as week-days, to attend lectures and classes without purchasing tickets. Others in the older parts of the ground under camp-meeting leases declared themselves beyond the jurisdiction of new rules made by the Assembly trustees. A strong party appeared demanding that the lot owners as a body should elect the trustees,--which meant that the future of a great and growing educational institution should be shaped not by a carefully selected Board under the guidance of two idealists,--one of whom was at the same time a practical businessman, a rare combination,--but by a gathering of lot-holders, not all of them intelligent, and the majority people who were keeping boarding-houses and were more eager for dollars than for culture. I remember a conversation with the proprietor of one of the largest boarding-houses who urged that the grounds be left open, with no gate-fees or tickets; but instead a ticket-booth at the entrance to each lecture-hall, so that people would be required to pay only for such lectures and entertainments as they chose to attend! I could name some Assemblies calling themselves Chautauquas, where this policy was pursued; and almost invariably one season or at most two seasons terminated their history.