Our temporal wants were few, and our intellectual opportunities, accordingly great.
One time in traveling through the mountainous part of Kentucky the most conspicuous sights were the cabin on the barren hillside and the razor-back hog with the proverbial knot in his tail to keep him from running through the crack in the rail fences. I was so impressed with the simplicity of the life there that I said to a gentleman on the train near me, “How do these people ever supply their wants?” He replied in the characteristic English of the locality, “Mister, they ain’t got no wants.” These people seemed to be happy. As I look back over my college work and experience when often the purse got down below the last nickel, I recall that our desires for knowledge were so paramount that we did not seem to have any wants.
At this time of life I take off my hat from the place where the hair ought to grow to do honor to the Ohio Normal University, because it made it possible for me and thousands of others to get inspiration for higher things. All honor to the Ohio Wesleyan University, my later school, for its scholarly instruction, its able professors, its college association, and above all its training in Christian manhood, a part of the curriculum never forgotten or neglected in the O. W. U.
May the years deal kindly with all such as the president emeritus of the Ohio Normal who will still inspire youths to do their best, and reach out to the things beyond. Rewards have come to many of my professors in the Ohio Wesleyan University, but the memory of their lives and work remains.
Any young man or woman who has no obligation but his own support can enjoy the advantages of the best educational institutions of this or the Old World and make every dollar of his expense independently.
From the very beginning my opportunities in school were very limited. I was the third child of a family of eight children. My parents were very poor and we older children had to work hard helping father fight the wolf from the door. Then too, father did not take the interest in sending us to school that he should have taken, although he was an educated man, and taught school nineteen years. He claimed that we could learn as much at home as we could at school. Holding to this theory he kept us at home. The theory might have worked well, if he had given us fixed hours for study and play; but instead of this he kept us at work on the farm all summer and fall. In winter he would cut and sell wood. Every morning, when the weather was not too severe, he took my two oldest brothers (and me too, when mother could spare me) to the woods to cut or saw a load of wood, while he hauled a load to town and sold it. Of course, I could not cut wood, but I could pull one end of a cross-cut saw equal to either one of my brothers. When the weather would not allow us to go to the woods, father made us study.