THE HESPERIAN
9
AS IT WAS IN THE DAYS OF YORE."
Cfye history of ditulization in tfye University,
Tho University yard, with its Hag-atone
walks and well kept lawns, is a thing of
beauty now. It was a horse pasture eight
years ago. It is hard to understand how
this could have been so, but so it was. The
citizens, livery-stable keepers, teamsters,
draymen, horse doctors, and farmers of
North Lincoln had made it tho common re
ceptacle for decrepit nags. Indeed it became
so well known for its excellence as a barn
yard that the faculty were at last driven to tho
necessity of requesting the city council to
construct a pound that should relieve the
pressure and receive the overflow.
The campus was like one of those gauze
fly-traps, so common in country districts some
years ago. It was surrounded by a dense
uncut hedge of osage orange and arbor vitae.
If a horse once got in, he would be forever
unable to get out. And even if he could find
an exit, ho never would make use of it; for
the yard was covered with a magnificent
growth of red clover. Even the students'
entrances were made impassible to him by a
series of posts sot in tho earth. I always
believed that tho member of the faculty that
proposed theso posts was not the "professor
of sience." They did not keep horses out,
but in; and whoever proposed them must
have been unacquainted with the analogous
hydrostatic laws governing tho behavior of
liquids in a closed vessel under pressure.
The red clover was cut several times during
tho summer and stacked up. These hay
stacks and tho main biulding constituted tho
University.
I forgot to state that 1 expect to be
believed concerning events of which 1 was an
eye-witness. But I assume no responsibility
for tradition.
In those days, Lincoln was either a Yenice
of mud or a Sahara of dust. There was not
an inch of pavement, sewer, street railway,
or electric wire in the town. The cadeta
used to have target practice on the bottoms
between the corner of Twelfth and N streets
and the region now occupied by the State
fair grounds. The city stopped short off at
Seventeenth street where the bottoms of
Antelope Creek began. Tho cemetery was
away out of town on O street where the Rock
Island railway now crosses. We, who were
inclined to science, would occasionally take
our dinners and extend our botany expedi
tions as far south as the Home for tho Friend
less, feeling elated at having scoured so
much prairie and explored so many gullieB.
In the city, things were equally primitive.
ill
few1
an
in