twenty years at hull house

which had sequestered from infinitude in a place small enough for my

child's mind, the courage and endurance which I could not comprehend so long as it was lost in "the void of unresponsive space" under

the vaulting sky itself. But through all my vivid sensations there persisted the image of the eagle in the corridor below and Lincoln himself

as an epitome of all that was great and good. I dimly caught the notion

of the martyred President as the standard hearer to the conscience of

his countrymen, as the eagle had been the ensign of courage to the

soldiers of the Wisconsin regiment.

Thirty-five years later, as I stood on the hill campus of the University of Wisconsin with a commanding view of the capitol building a

mile directly across the city, I saw again the dome which had so

uplifted my childish spirit. The university, which was celebrating its

fiftieth anniversary, had honored me with a doctor's degree, and in the

midst of tfie academic pomp and the rejoicing, the dome again appeared to me as a fitting symbol of a state's aspiration even in its high

mission of universal education.

Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the simplicity

which is given to the understanding of a child, caught a notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men had lost their

lives that the slaves might he free. At any moment the conversation of

our elders might turn upon these heroic events; there were red-letter

days, when a certain general came to see my father, and again when 3Governor Oglesby, whom all Illinois children called "Uncle Dick,"

spent a Sunday under the pine trees in our front yard. We felt on those

days a connection with the great world so much more heroic than the

village world which surrounded us through all the other days. My father was a member of the State Senate for the sixteen years between

1854 and 1870, and even as a little child I was dimly conscious of

the grave march of public affairs in his comings and goings at the state

capital.

He was much too occupied to allow time for reminiscence, hut I remember overhearing a conversation between a visitor and himself concerning the stirring days before the war, when it was by no means

certain that the Union men in the Legislature would always have

enough votes to keep Illinois from seceding. I heard with breathless

interest my father's account of the trip a majority of the legislators had

made one dark day to St. Louis, that there might not he enough men