Page:The plastic age, (IA plasticage00mark).pdf/16

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
4
THE PLASTIC AGE

There are some who declare that their successors learn less.

Hezekiah built Sanford Hall, a fine Georgian building, performed the duties of trustees, presi¬ dent, dean, and faculty for thirty years, and then passed to his reward, leaving three thousand acres, his library of five hundred books, mostly sermons, Sanford Hall, and a charter that opened the gates of Sanford to all men so that they might “find the true light of God and the glory of Jesus in the halls of this most liberal college.”

More than a century had passed since Hezekiah was laid to rest in Haydensville’s cemetery. The college had grown miraculously and changed even more miraculously. Only the hill and its beauti¬ ful surroundings remained the same. Indian Lake, on the south of the campus, still sparkled in the sun¬ light; on the east the woods were as virgin as they had been a hundred and fifty years before. Haydensville, still only a village, surrounded the col¬ lege on the west and north.

Hezekiah’s successors had done strange things to his campus. There were dozens of buildings now surrounding Sanford Hall, and they revealed ail the types of architecture popular since Hezekiah had thundered his last defiance at Satan. There were fine old colonial buildings, their windows out¬ lined by English ivy; ponderous Romanesque build¬ ings made of stone, grotesque and hideous; a