tended his horizon. Up to the autumn of 1876
Page had never gone farther North than Ashland; he was still a Southern
boy, speaking with the Southern drawl, living exclusively the thoughts
and even the prejudices of the South. His family's broad-minded attitude
had prevented him from acquiring a too restricted view of certain
problems that were then vexing both sections of the country; however,
his outlook was still a limited one, as his youthful correspondence
shows. But in October of the centennial year a great prospect opened
before him.

III

Two or three years previously an eccentric merchant named Johns Hopkins
had died, leaving the larger part of his fortune to found a college or
university in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins was not an educated man himself
and his conception of a new college did not extend beyond creating
something in the nature of a Yale or Harvard in Maryland. By a lucky
chance, however, a Yale graduate who was then the President of the
University of California, Daniel Coit Gilman, was invited to come to
Baltimore and discuss with the trustees his availability for the
headship of the new institution. Dr. Gilman promptly informed his
prospective employers that he would have no interest in associating
himself with a new American college built upon the lines of those which
then existed. Such a foundation would merely be a duplication of work
already well done elsewhere and therefore a waste of money and effort.
He proposed that this large endowment should be used, not for the
erection of expensive architecture, but primarily for seeking out, in
all parts of the world, the best professorial brains in certain approved
branches of learning. In the same spirit he suggested that a similarly
selective process be adopted in the choice of students: that only those
American boys who had displayed exceptional promise should be admitted
and that part of the university funds should be used to pay the expenses
of twenty young men who, in undergraduate work at other colleges, stood
head and shoulders above their contemporaries. The bringing together of
these two sets of brains for graduate study would constitute the new
university. A few rooms in the nearest dwelling house would suffice for
headquarters. Dr. Gilman's scheme was approved; he became President on
these terms; he gathered his faculty not only in the United States but
in England, and he collected his first body of students, especially his
first twenty f