coming to! ME doubt the Bible!". . .

The interview of that day was one of the signs of two storms which
were approaching: one appointed to reach the University, one to
reach the lad.

The storm now gathering in many quarters and destined in a few
years to burst upon the University was like its other storms that
had gone before: only, this last one left it a ruin which will stay
a ruin.

That oldest, best passion of the Kentucky people for the
establishment in their own land of a broad institution of learning
for their own sons, though revived in David's time on a greater
scale than ever before, was not to be realized. The new University,
bearing the name of the commonwealth and opening at the close of
the Civil War as a sign of the new peace of the new nation, having
begun so fairly and risen in a few years to fourth or fifth place
in patronage among all those in the land, was already entering upon
its decline. The reasons of this were the same that had
successively ruined each of its predecessors: the same old
sectarian quarrels, enmities, revenges; the same old political
oppositions and hatreds; the same personal ambitions, jealousies,
strifes.

Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the western
wilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-
seeing people had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to
confiscate and sell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to
found a public seminary for Kentucky boys--not a sectarian school.