ven years of its life thus far (1920) has been
the growth of a giant. Territorially, on Chautauqua Lake, it has
enlarged at successive stages from twenty acres to more than three
hundred and thirty acres, impelled partly by a demand of its increasing
family for house-room, educational facilities, and playgrounds, partly
from the necessity of controlling its surroundings to prevent occupation
by undesirable neighbors. There has been another vast expansion in the
establishment of Chautauquas elsewhere, until the continent is now
dotted with them. A competent authority informs the writer that within
twelve months ten thousand assemblies bearing the generic name
Chautauqua have been held in the United States and the Dominion of
Canada. There has been a third growth in the intellectual sweep of its
plans. We have seen how it began as a system of training for teachers in
the Sunday School. We shall trace its advancement into the wider field
of general and universal education, a school in every department and for
everybody everywhere.

To at least one pilgrim the Assembly of 1875 was monumental, for it
marked an epoch in his life. That was the writer of this volume, who in
that year made his first visit to Chautauqua. (The general reader who
has no interest in personal reminiscences may omit this paragraph.) He
traveled by the Erie Railroad, and that evening for the first time in
his life saw a berth made up in a sleeping-car, and crawled into it. If
in his dreams that night, a vision could have flashed upon his inward
eye of what that journey was to bring to him in the coming years, he
might have deemed it an Arabian Night's dream. For that visit to
Chautauqua, not suddenly but in the after years, changed the entire
course of his career. It sent him to Chautauqua thus far for forty-six
successive seasons, and perhaps may round him out in a semi-centennial.
It took him out of a parsonage, and made him an itinerant on a
continent-wide scale. It put him into Dr. Vincent's office as an
assistant, and later in his chair as his successor. It dropped him down
through the years at Chautauqua assemblies in almost half of the States
of this Union. On Tuesday morning, August 3, 1875, I left the train at
Jamestown, rode across the city, and embarked in a steamer for a voyage
up the lake. As we slowly wound our way through the Outlet--it was on
the old steamer _Jamestown_ which was never an ocean-greyhound--I felt
like an explorer in some