Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/380

 reach Columbus that evening for the meeting which was to close the campaign, I was in a symbolic manner racing with my own fate; that campaign a success and I should be free. I should have liked to linger a while in Delaware, where I had spent a portion of my boyhood when my father was a pastor there, and where in the University my uncle William F. Whitlock had been a professor of Latin and literature for half a century, dean of the faculty, and, for a while, president. As we passed by the chapel in the shade of the old elms on the campus I felt that I could still hear the solemn strains of the noble hymn they sang at his funeral, the lusty young voices of a thousand students, united with the quivering trebles of some old clergymen, in "Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still."

My eyes could pierce the walls of the chapel, closed and silent that afternoon for the autumn term had not opened, and I could see myself sitting there in the pew with our family, and looking at the portrait in oil of my uncle on the wall, among the portraits of the other presidents of the University, faintly adumbrating on his great smoothly shaven face the smile of quizzical humor which he wears in my memory. I sat there,

by these tears a little boy again,

and thought of those days so long before when at evening he would come to our house and stand spreading his hands before the fire for a while; he generally brought under his arm a book for my father to read. I remembered that he used to carry