ildings of yellow stone and
heavy red tiles, nestling under high hills that run back to mountains,
surrounded by wide grain fields flecked with rounded live-oaks and tall
strange eucalyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns and well-kept
paddocks and exercising tracks in which sleek trotting horses of famous
Palo Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a strange new setting for
studying Greek and Latin and mathematics and science.

"_Die Luft der Freiheit weht_" is the Stanford motto; and there was
truly no more likely place for the winds of freedom to blow than over
and through this college on a California ranch. And its founders did
well to find for its first head a man than whom no other American
scholar had given clearer indications of being anxious to break with
clogging scholastic tradition.

The university itself, so tenderly conceived as a memorial to a boy lost
to his parents, and so generously established as an opportunity for
other boys, some of whom, like the hero of our story, might have had
their parents lost to them, is an almost unique example of a great
educational institution maintained by the fortune of a single family.
All of the Stanford millions are returned today to the country in which
they were accumulated in the form of a great endowment and of the
beautiful halls in which thousands of students have found a free
training for independent existence and right citizenship. These students
wear the Stanford cardinal as a red badge of obligation, not anarchy. No
other college in the country had more of its sons and daughters, in
proportion to their total number, devoting themselves to their country's
service during the Great War. If Herbert Hoover was the most
distinguished of the serving sons of Stanford he was not more eager and
devoted than many others.

But we leave Our Hero waiting too long upon the threshold of his dream
university come true. It had been agreed, you remember, between young
Hoover and his friendly examiner in Portland that the candidate for
admission should come to the Stanford Farm--which is the students' name
for the campus, and which literally described it in those beginning
days--before the time of the opening of the university to be coached in
the two or three studies in which his preparation was deficient.

So he came down from the North a month before the announced time for
opening, a lonesome boy without any friends at Stanford except the good
Quaker professor of mat