Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/23

 UMPQUA ACADEMY 13 Again: "The campus rang with strange sounds at night and sometimes in day light all manner of loafish gestures and waggish ways disgraced the social intercourse of some of the students." Were it not for the incriminating evidence of the record it would be a delightful task to write of the manliness of the young men and the womanly virtues that adorned the sweet girls, but the stated necessity of so many "Rules and Reg- ulations" and the preambles that precede them, suggest that no such extended comment be made just here. Read this: "Night revelings was [sic] sometimes indulged even to very late hours. Profane swearing was slyly but to an alarming extent practiced so extensively indeed that before the knowl- edge thereof came to the faculty nearly a dozen boys were involved therein, and some of them quite young boys, too." Alas, we are prone to evil as the sparks are to fly upward ! "and not content with these sly immoralities, the designing came boldly into our religious meetings and there for weeks persisted in acts, gestures, whisperings, laughing and other measures of disrespect and disturbances which for weeks greatly annoyed these gatherings." After noting "a painful sense of the defect in our academic relations" it was decided to invade Gaul, so the Rubicon was crossed and we find: "This defect became still more ap- parent when on the trustees convening and taking legal counsel the Judge decided that without some further laws enacted by the corporate body the school was as powerless as a common school and could only have supervision of its students while in or about the school, or in school groups. That after their dispersion at night they might do as they pleased either singly or in groups, even to drunkenness and profanity and: existing authority could not recognize them till again collected in school groups next morning." A trustee meeting was called for March, 1859, attending were "Dr. Miller, Judge Deady and Messrs. Kuykendall, Hill and Grubbe, forming a legal quorum according to the charter. Also Rev. T. F. Royal, Agent. E. Arnold in behalf of the