who are yet to come, and from whose lips we know will flow happily chosen words that will burn and stir, and be remembered, I am surprised at my own audacity in presuming to stand up amongst the Websters and the Clays, the attic orators, the equals of whom only the Pennsylvania State College turns out. I must crave your indulgence for having already apparently wandered so widely from my subject. In doing so I have but been the unconscious imitator of a cross-roads would-be Cicero to whom ’twas mine to listen in one of the wildest word-pyrotechnics that ever greeted ear of man. It was in that sister State, in which but to be born is to be president, that speaker took that glorious bird of freedom, beneath whose pinion we’ve licked the sturdy Briton, the swarthy sons of Montezuma, the copper tinted friends who skulk amid our Western hills and lift the hair of our hardy pioneers with the very knives we’ve given them. Figuratively upon Atlantic’s sand he,flung that eagle high aloft, and, as he soared away in the wake of the descending sun, he took us all along and followed him. Away into the West that feathered leader led us—over that Appalachian ridge that rises the lone and solitary battlement which the hamlet of Philadelphia has to protect it against being swallowed by greedy Pittsburg—over that broad valley, the tricklings from whose soil are carried to the gulf by the Missis sippi route —across those great plateaus that are but wide verandas to the Rockies’ piled-up architecture. High above that cloud-crowned continental nucleus o’er which the doughty ‘ Path- Finder’ blazed a trail—on, over the Sierras, those fissured, canoned hills from which is dug the only metal that we may coin as money, on and on, passing beyond the line of sun-kissed surf that ceaseless beats upon the Golden Gate—on and on and on, until, until, we lost the darned old bird. Thus doth my theme but lead us far and wide, but still in spite of our apparent fruitless chase we find we do not need to e’er retrace a solitary step—we’re not obliged to go back home to seek for our Alumni. Geographically, we are übiquitous and omnipresent. There’s scarce a State or Territory whose crops are made to grow or mill wheels turn by act of Congress or Presidential message, in which the Pennsylvania State College has not a son—a son of whom she may be justly proud. Broad as may appear this governmental fabric, remote as we The Free Lance , [June,
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