William and Mary College, the oldest of the American colleges except Harvard, is situated in the old colonial capital, Williamsburg, sometimes called The Middle Plantation. Before the college was burned the first time it had many rare volumes marked with the coats of arms of royalty and noblemen whose names were connected with its early days. Within its walls were trained the youth of the eighteenth century who were to consecrate their lives to the cause of liberty. The Reverend James Blair was its founder and its first president. He went to London and unfolded his scheme of Christianizing the Indians and educating the youth of America. Queen Mary warmly approved of his plan. King William was equally agreeable and gave an order for two thousand pounds sterling to be used in the erection of the buildings. But when Seymour, the Attorney-General, received the order to draw up the charter and pay the money, he was enraged. The nation was engaged in an expensive war, he said, and needed the money for other and better purposes—why was a college wanted in Virginia, anyhow? Mr. Blair explained its purpose as being that of preparing young men for the ministry, adding that the people of Virginia had souls to save as well as the people of England. The idea struck Seymour as particularly absurd and maudlin; his retort, historically recorded, was: “Souls! ⸺ your souls! Make tobacco!” [Illustration: BASSETT HALL] The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the first fraternal society in this country, was organized at William and Mary December 5th, 1776, and the first meeting was held in the Apollo room at the Raleigh tavern. Jefferson, the first Democrat, was in 1764, five years after Washington had been happily married to Martha Custis, a gay young student at Williamsburg, or “Devilsburg,” as he wrote of it, in a letter to a friend, expressing himself as being “as happy last night as dancing with Belinda in the Apollo room” could make him.