Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/37



With recollections of the Umpqua Academy fifty-five to sixty-four years ago, what a panorama of memory pictures come trooping up.

What a throng of faces young and fair, of forms youthful and strong, what a chorus of voices joyous in song, sport, laughter or screams of delight. What pictures of school days and social life; the old time school exhibitions, Saturday fish- ing excursions, with the inevitable swim in the Umpqua river, the Christmas anniversaries, Fourth of July celebrations, strawberry parties, rambles over the hill back of the academy, and rolling those great stones of conglomerate that went bounding and thundering down among the oaks, laurels and brush, and broke into thousands of pebbles that went sprawling everywhere, to the terror of chipmunks and cotton-tails. Then their pensive strollings, book in hand, among the trees, or sitting in the shade, conning* over amo-amas-amat, or trying to conjugate some tough Greek verb or figure out a problem in logarithms, while robins sang in the boughs above, or saucy little chipmunks with striped backs, and with tails erect and bright inquisitive eyes crept over logs and stumps about you. Those were halcyon days. Ah, the soft, balmy, dreamy atmosphere, the deep blue sky, the beautiful oak and laurel crowned hills and the enchanting valley spread out be- tween !

Such are the memory pictures that come to me like a dream of a long past, far away fairyland.

Through the mists of over sixty years there comes to me a picture of the old Umpqua Academy, standing up like a great white sentinel, against the tree clad hill back of it. Here I see a group of boys playing marbles, there a bevy of girls with wild flowers, decorating each other's hair or arranging garlands and bouquets; down on the campus I see a game