The Kansas University. Weekly
VOL. VI LAWRENCE, KANSAS, JANUARY, 1901.
NO. 5.
NEW ENGLAND SCENERY.
Mr. Neal Writes Entertaining'y of Connecticut Landscapes.
Robert Neal '98 is now teaching at Wallington, Connecticut. The following interesting passages occur in a letter of his to a Kansas friend. Mr. Neal was at one time connected with the English department here:
"It is the nakedest land your lewdest imagination ever conceived. The earth is as bare of soil as a maiden at a Seely dinner is of raiment. I am soulsick for soil. If I could just see one acre of ground with even six inches, nay a single inch of soil atop of it, I would gladly wade over it a score of times to my shoe tops in mud!
But the scenery is something to live for when one is in spirits. Always something new, and around you always the blue or purple or black of the hills.
Last year, with autumn the foliage became bright at once, but this year it seemed dead, so that I began to mourn that we were not to have our recompense for existence this season in a landscape painted by the hectic blush of decay, but not so. Suddenly in a day it seemed to me—the leaves took on their proper brightness, and beautified the world, and so went to their everlasting rotting in a blaze of glory like kings and martyrs. Then you should have seen the pleasant soberness of the evergreens in all this tinsel show. There they stood-pines, and cedars and hemlocks,-according to my best information and belief-as immortal and as fair to look upon as the undying gods among the perishing Greeks at Troy. Now, only they remain; and between them show the rising slopes of boundless sand out of which ascend the hills, like peaks submerged by the sea, or here and there a browner square, where some overconfident countryman has wasted time in turning an acre or two of this same sand inside out, in the foolish hope that seed scattered will produce enough fold to sow a like patch the coming year.
But there is no feeling of infinity about these sand plains, such as our mighty prairies give; the hills prevent that. One cannot feel the greatness of all outdoors, with his vision all hemmed in by rising chains of hills whatever way he looks, and even the salt water does not make him breathe that deep stirring breath of freedom that one can draw in as he sits on a good horse and looks out miles, and miles and miles, to where "The earth bends up to heaven and heaven bends down to earth." The sea, I imagine, might give the feeling of immensity, but no one but only the sailor could feel freedom on it."
General Order.
The final preliminary to select three debaters to represent Kansas in the Kansas Missouri debate, will be held Wednesday, Feb.27th, in the University chapel.
Each duly accredited literary society in