Page:Address of J. Wilson Gibbes at the Home-Coming Banquet of Citadel Alumni (1924).djvu/10

 I am one of the 170 boys who passed through the old sallyport on October 2, 1882, when the Citadel's gates were reopened. Fifty-three of us finished the course, comprising a graduating class that held the record for number until 1922, when we were topped by one.

While I believe that any cadet who receives the diploma of the Citadel is well equipped to make a solid and helpful citizen, and has it in him to attain supremacy, I feel that you will permit me to say that time enough has elapsed to show that the graduates of the eighties have loomed large in the life and history of South Carolina, and have justified the rehabilitation of her Military Academy. Thinking of them, I feel that I may use the language of Thomas Gray: "Ah, tell them they are men!"

May I mention by name just two? Here sits one—"Ollie" Bond, whom the Class of '86 gave you for your president, called by us all the best all-round cadet and scholar of the class, whose scholarship, courtesy and character fit him alike to guide your councils and to grace your festivals.

And the other, "Ollie" Leland (there he is!), master-builder, whom the Class of '86 also furnished to erect the New Citadel. We love him and South Carolina is proud of him.

These cadets of the eighties!

They illustrate those beautiful lines of Edward Moore's in "The Happy Marriage":

Time still, as he flies, brings increase to their truth, And gives to their minds what he steals from their youth.

To night, let us, children of this our common mother, look back to the days we passed in that still retreat, the drum and fife of which have murdered sleep for so many generations of drowsy adolescents. In order to give you a true picture of cadet life in those days, instead of relying upon faulty memory, I quote from a letter I wrote my mother on January 11, 1886: