Knox College - Gale Yearbook (Galesburg, IL)

Page 8 text:

THE LINCOLN - DOUGLAS DEBATE It was a day, we know, which was very much like the day a hundred years before; old newspapers told us that October 7, 1858, was chill, with a sharp wind blowing in from the prairie and pulling at the bunting which hung from the speakers’ platform. There might have been rain, too, a hundred years before. Whether there was or not one finds it rather hard to mind very much the rain that fell at the Centennial, for the rain blotted out new buildings, new clothes, and new people and in a very strange way brought into focus the side of an old building, the platform which stood against it, and the figures in brown and black and grey who stood on the platform and spoke old words. The rain was a good thing that day. When the wagons, and the horses, and the carriages rolled through the crowd it was somehow more than anything else the rain-made deep brown prairie mud splattered up onto the wheels which made one know for sure that what he watched HAD happened a hundred years before. Figures, shapes, people moved in and out of the rain that day almost as though they moved from past to present, and into the past again. A sign, “Free Kansas!’ Another sign, “Knox College for Lincoln.” And another, “Douglas, the Little Giant.” Shapes, and figures, and people across a century.