le he studied."

All this was enough for the wise teacher. And an arrangement was
mutually agreed on between examiner and examined to the effect that if
young Hoover would work diligently for the rest of the summer on the
literary necessities of the situation, and come on early to Stanford for
a little special coaching, he might consider his probabilities for
admission to the university so high as to be reckoned a sure thing.

Well, it all turned out as desired by both candidate and examiner. And
Herbert Hoover was enrolled the following October among the first
students, the "pioneer class" of Stanford University, and was actually
the first Stanford student to inhabit the beautiful great new dormitory
called Encina Hall. It was not only his university of dreams come true,
but it was really to be the university of his graduation, the _alma
mater_ of a boy without any other mother. And it was the university of
which he was to become, in later successful years, a patron and trustee.
Stanford did much for Herbert Hoover; but so has he done much for
Stanford.

Any university means many things, for all their lives, to those who have
come timidly and wonderingly to its doors as boys and girls, and have
gone out on that final day of happy reward and tearful good-byes as men
and women eager to try themselves against the world outside of sheltered
school-rooms. And most of these things are to most persons who have
known them, things of pleasant and loving memory.

Stanford is like any other university in this relation to its graduates.
But there seems to be something unusually strong and yet at the same
time unusually intangible in the ties that bind its former students to
it. Perhaps the explanation lies as much in the special character of its
students, at least its pioneer ones, as in the special character of the
institution itself. The students who came to Stanford in its earlier
years came because it was different from other colleges, and because
they did this it is likely that they themselves were different from
other students. Like the restless, seeking pioneers that came over the
desert and mountains to the Pacific Coast to find a different life from
that of worn tradition and old ways, their descendants and the later
coming youth, who had mixed with them and been infected by their seeking
spirit, flocked to this institution that offered a different kind of
college atmosphere.

Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission bu