Park University - Narva Yearbook (Parkville, MO)

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certainly time they were out of their present quarters, where they have suffered many things of many winters. This is the most im¬ posing and most commodious residence in this center of culture and art, and it occupies the most commanding site in the town. It is constructed throughout of native limestone and hard wood. The carpenters have done only superior cabinet work on the interior. The ample entrance, with the tall round columns of limestone, gives an impression at once of homelikeness and solidity. All the modern conveniences have been introduced into the equipment. The Alumni Building was the talk of the first Narva; it is now long since an accomplished fact. It is handsome, and right where it belongs. The Alumni have come back home and slept in it now and then; crowds of them have come together and eaten and lounged in it; the faculty and the classes and the literary societies and the clubs and the musical organizations and missionary societies have pow-wowed and fed and fiddled and mapped out campaigns in it. Orators have cracked the plastering overhead and around the sides; the rhetorical drill-masters live in it the most of the day; hundreds of good letters from Alumni all over the world have found their way to it. Everybody has used it a thousand times and been thankful for the chance. Some of the grading has been done for a new dormitory, and before this book is out there may have been many a hard lick struck on the site of the new Library Building. Mr. Carnegie’s fif¬ teen thousand go into the structure at once, and others will follow in later years until the equipment is ample for the greater Park Col¬ lege which is to be after not long. Then there are walks, bless their substantial dryness! There are a lot of them, granitoid for the ages, and the foundations laid for miles more. The shaping of the contour of the campus goes forward steadily. Contour in the present case is good. The campus at most points is like the land in this region, valued doubly by the farmer since he can farm both sides of it. The campus stands out each year more distinctly against the sky line. Most notable in the development of the soil has been the ad¬ vance in horticultural lines. There has been large addition to the acreage of orchard. If the promise of the present season is fulfilled there will be enough fruit of all sorts to fatten Pharaoh’s lean cat¬ tle for seven years to come, and allow eating peaches out of the hand all season through into the reckoning. There are a hundred acres of young apple trees not yet ready for serious business , 1 but with a plenty of years ahead for them to grow. The end of the world is not expected at once with all the multiplying millenial signs. When it comes to statement of funds the word of today may be to retract tomorrow. The endowment ;und is growing all the time, slowly it often seems to those most strenuously devoted to its enlargement, but growing steadily all the same. There are about

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What Was Not for the First Narva and Is for the Second. There is the Heating and Lighting plant: that is the latest and biggest; some are disposed to think it the best. One of the old fogies heard afar of the innovation and wrote that he feared for the temper of student life at Park College, now that there is no incentive to chop up an armload of green wood on the flat by the old well, struggle with it up the hill to Copley and, out of one corner of his eye, watch the sap fry on the end of the stick, while he occupies the other three corners in an encounter with trigonometry baked on one side and frozen on the other. The good fellow cannot under¬ stand how much more wholesome is the modern trigonometry done through and through by steam. Depend upon Professor Mattoon, anyway, to see that trigonometry is warm material. In contributing to activity of mind, health of body, and sane and wholesome religion able to rise above stove-pipe connections and smoky furnaces, the heating plant leaves nothing to be desired. And the light puts the Standard Oil company well nigh oat of commission. If it were not for the night-watch’s lantern Mr. Rockefeller might take his pro¬ posed vacation in Europe with his mind free from care. Now that your attention is fixed upon houses and such like, there is the Labor Hall, which makes it a deeper joy every day to serve God and one’s fellowmen. Everybody has heard what the house is for, but nobody knows who has not seen it and used it. It is to dignify labor and keep the laborer clean and : earty. The inst ; - tution is in large part bath appliance. There are showers and tubs, and a swimming pool, for which latter the severer weather has proved too much, but it is a great boon through all the warmer sea¬ son, and will eventually be provided with warm water the year round. The gymnasium in the building will sometime be equipped for the use of the office men and anybody else. Offices and tool and repair shops provided in the building are important new facilities of the work department. There is the President’s residence, nearing completion as this is written. The President and his family will probably be securely housed in it by the time this is in the hands of its readers. It is

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three hundred and fifty thousand dollars invested now and if they are not doubled before long it will not be because hard work is lacking. Inside doors everywhere the reformation, revolution, reconstruc¬ tion, rejuvenation, wrought by the heating plant has already been referred to. Business always proceeds regardless of the weal her. More women singe off their eyelashes in the laboratories, and more men burn holes in their vest fronts than ever before, because eye¬ lashes and vests and corrosive acids are more plentiful than ever. The next Narva published will tell of the erection of a building for the Science Department fully equipped with the best now a-going in that line. Professor Findlay’s year of furlough in study and travel filled his head fuller of trilobites than ever and Professor Dean is soon to be off for his year. Dr. Wolfe brought back from his study and travel abroao all sorts of new tricks for making the Freshmen wonder whether it was a cyclone or a page of Livy which struck them, while art enthusiasm now being cultivated, needs only a water color thrust into the field of vision to tilt every other head on the campus to one side. Professor Mattoon, after pumping clean dry two departments of learning in Cambridge University, returned to spill liquefied star dust about the place until it trickles through the cracks in the sidewalk, and, as Cy Creighton would put it, two whole classes in college are out rubbering for total solar eclipses three nights out of the week. Dr. Burt brought back with him great chunks of enthusiasm straight from the factories where history is made. Since that year in the German beer-gardens he walks down the street more unmistakably than ever, like a coming event, cast¬ ing his shadow before. There is no telling what will come of Pro¬ fessor Magers’ present year among the Greeks at Harvard and elsewhere. No one will be surprised to see his Beau Brummel nose masked as puggy as Socrates’ and his Adam’s apple rounded off to furnish a collar button for his tunic. It is understood that the twins already address each other as Castor and Pollux. Everybody is learning everything better and more of it. Music is booming, — which does not imply that base drum artists alone are being produced. If any student does not know how to read music now, it is because he has spent the study hour forgetting. The Glee Club sings better and looks handsomer than ever. The Band gave a splendid concert this year. The Orchestra of this year is the largest which has ever been seriously attempted, and has contributed good music . Four or five instructors are pushing along the musical inter¬ ests and others are giving substantial boosts. Oratory is flopping its wings and soaring. Barnes, ’04, won first place in the state. Newell, ’04, won first in the state and lost rst in the inter-state by the wink of one judge’s eyelash. Murphy, ’05, won second in the state. Zion, ’06, has won first in the state and by the time this is printed will be grooming for the inter-state. And Debates,—bless your heart! you should hear these later generations debate! Those were thought to be glorious days when the first Narva found its t e-