The First Chapter of the A. 8c M. College.
W. A. TRENCKMANN.
T IS probable that the headline
which I had selected may have
led some of you to expect to hear from
stories of early college days. If this
should be the case, I must disappoint
you. In the presence of friends who
have known me for many years, I
would not dare assert that I had never
told a story. I could not do so with
out injuring my standing as a news
paper man past redemption; but I may
say, in all candor, and in the words
of some early writer, whose name I do
not recall at present: “I’m one of
those who never told a tale, but they
in telling marred it.’’ Neither shall I
attempt to chronicle all events of im
portance that happened within the col
lege walls or on the campus in three
years. There is no epoch in a man’s
existence, excepting only that one in
which it was his good luck to win
her smiles who now pours out his
evening tea and spanks his sons and
heirs, on proper occasions, to which his
thoughts revert so often and so fondly
as to his college days. Should I under
take to tell you but the half of what
seems of moment to me, I could not
get past the first two weeks without
exhausting my allotted time and your
patience as well. It is my purpose to
sketch for you the A. & M. College as
I knew it in my student days and to
accomplish this I shall have to neglect
details and use bold and rapid strokes.
When, a year ago, I witnessed your
Commencement exercises, my first im
pression was one of delighted astonish
ment at sight of the changes which
nineteen years—a brief period, after
all, in the history of a great educa
tional institution—had wrought here.
To those of my fellow alumni who
have found it possible to visit these
scenes more frequently the transfor
mation accomplished may have ap
peared less astonishing; but to me,
since in all those years I had seen the
college walls but once, and then in the
uncertain light of an autumn night
from a swiftly passing train, they
seemed but little short of those en
chantments we read about in Arabian
Nights. But'side by side with the
magnificent reality arose a vision of
the college as it appeared to me in the
early days of October, 1876, when I en
tered its walls, perhaps the most ver
dant of all the farmer boys who have
enjoyed that privilege.
And now I ask you to turn back
with me to view the “Old College,” as
it stands imprinted indelibly on my
inner eye. Exterior surroundings, of
course, have changed slightly. We
see a broad prairie, a rift in that great
belt of timber which stretches almost
unbroken from the red banks of the
Brazos to the eastern border of our
State. From the highest point of this
prairie the main building of the
college, impressive in its massiveness
and severe simplicity of style, rises
upward; on the left we behold the
“Old Mess Hall,” which, even in those
days, could scarcely be called beauti
ful, but was destined soon to become
for us an object of tender solicitude,
“a name to conjure with,” especially
after evening drill and morning roll-
call. Not a tree nor a shrub relieves
the monotony of the prairie, on which
but recently herds of deer have
browsed in peace and on which the
wild beast of the forest, that dread-