welcoming Youth and Peace.

All that day a lad, alone at his field work away off on the edge of
the bluegrass lands, toiled as one listening to a sublime sound in
the distance--the tramping, tramping, tramping of the students as
they assembled from the farms of the state and from other states.
Some boys out of his own neighborhood had started that morning, old
schoolfellows. He had gone to say good-by; had sat on the bed and
watched them pack their fine new trunks--cramming these with fond
maternal gifts and the thoughtless affluence of necessary and
unnecessary things; had heard all the wonderful talk about classes
and professors and societies; had wrung their hands at last with
eyes turned away, that none might see the look in them--the
immortal hunger.

How empty now the whole land without those two or three boys! Not
far away across the fields, soft-white in the clear sunshine, stood
the home of one of them--the green shutters of a single upper room
tightly closed. His heart-strings were twisted tight and wrung
sore this day; and more than once he stopped short in his work (the
cutting of briers along a fence), arrested by the temptation to
throw down his hook and go. The sacred arguments were on his side.
Without choice or search of his they clamored and battered at his
inner ear--those commands of the Gospels, the long reverberations
of that absolute Voice, bidding irresolute workaday disciples leave
the plough in the furrow, leave whatsoever task was impending or
duty uppermost to the living or the dead, and follow,--"Follow Me!"

Arguments, verily, had he in plenty; but raiment--no; nor scrip.
And knew he ever so little of the world, sure he felt of this: that