nd inspired by letters
signed with it.

I have heard more than one person say, "I want to go to Chautauqua, if
it is only to become acquainted with K. F. Kimball."

Let me transcribe a few sentences written by Mr. Frank Chapin Bray, who
as Editor of _The Chautauquan Magazine_, was for years in close relation
with Miss Kimball.

Many will always think of her as a kind of
Chautauqua Mother Superior. The details of the
work of an Executive Secretary are not
transcribable for they were multifarious
drudgeries year after year which defy analysis.
During thirty-five years she made them the means
of transmitting a great idea as a dynamic force
vital to hundreds of thousands of men and women
the world around.

Next to the originating genius of John H. Vincent, the influence which
made the Chautauqua Home Reading Course one of the mightiest
educational forces of the nineteenth century was the tireless energy and
the executive ability of Kate F. Kimball.

About 1912 she was suddenly taken with an illness, not deemed serious at
the time, but later found to have been a slight paralytic shock. She was
given a year's vacation from office work and spent most of it in England
and on the continent. Some of her friends think that if she had
absolutely abstained from work, she might have recovered her health; but
while in England she visited nearly all its great cathedrals, and wrote
a series of articles for _The Chautauquan_ on "An English Cathedral
Journey," afterward embodied in one of the best of the non-technical
books on that subject. She returned to her desk, but not in her former
vigor. Year by year her powers of thought and action declined, and she
died June 17, 1917, in the fifty-seventh year of her age, leaving after
her not only a precious memory but an abiding influence; for the plans
initiated by her adaptive mind are still those effective in the shaping
of the Chautauqua Circle.

[Illustration: Hall of the Christ]

[Illustration: Entrance to the Hall of Philosophy]

The course of reading for the first year was as follows: Green's _Short
History of the English People_; with it the little hand-book by Dr.
Vincent--Chautauqua Text-Book No. 4, _Outline of English History_; an
arrangement by periods, enabling the reader to arrange the events in
order; Chautauqua Text-Book No. 5, _Outline of Greek History_; Professor
Mahaffy's _O