"Where do you boys want to go now?" he asked my companion and me as we appeared.
"Students?" he asked, with kindly interest.
Neither of us had been taken for a student in many, many years; the agreeable suggestion was worth an extra quarter to him. Perhaps he had guessed as much.
The drive took us out Massachusetts Avenue, which, when it escapes the business part of town, becomes an agreeable, tree-bordered thoroughfare, reminiscent of New England. Presently our rattle-trap machine turned to the right and began the ascent of a hill so steep as to cause the driver to drop back into "first." It was a long hill, too; we crawled up for several blocks before attaining the plateau at the top, where stands the University of Kansas.
The setting of the college surprised us, for, if there was one thing that we had expected more than another, it was that Kansas would prove absolutely flat. Yet here we were on a mountain top--at least they call it Mount Oread--with the valley of the Kaw River below, and what seemed to be the whole of Kansas spread round about, like a vast panoramic mural decoration for the university--a maplike picture suggesting those splendid decorations of Jules Guerin's in the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York.
I know of no university occupying a more suitable position or a more commanding view, although it must be recorded that the university has been more fortunate in the selection of its site than in its architecture and the arrangement of its grounds. Like other colleges founded forty or fifty years ago, the University of Kansas started in a small way, and failed entirely to anticipate the greatness of its future. The campus seems to have "just growed" without regard to the grouping of buildings or to harmony between them, and the architecture is generally poor. Nevertheless there is a sort of homely charm about the place, with its unimposing, helter-skelter piles of brick and stone, its fine trees, and its sweeping view.
It was principally with the purpose of visiting the University of Kansas that we stopped in Lawrence. We had heard much of the great, energetic state colleges, which had come to hold such an important place educationally, and in the general life of the Middle West and West, and had planned to visit one of them. Originally we had in mind the University of Wisconsin, because we had heard so much about it; later, however, it struck us that everybody else had heard a good deal about it, too, and that we had better visit some less widely advertised college. We hit on the University of Kansas because Kansas is the most typical American agricultural state, and also because a Kansan, whom we met on the train, informed us that "In Kansas we are hell on education."