THE BIRTHPLACE OF WOODROW WILSON

The father of President Wilson preached in the First Presbyterian Church; now the Chapel of the Mary Baldwin Seminary, established in 1842.

This was a most interesting place for the study of Psychology. Insane persons are often like a musical instrument with a single key out of order; they are all right in most things, but strike a chord containing that note and off they go. One woman there, who was very large, believed that she could go through a keyhole, and she often tried it with disastrous results. Another was always looking under her bed: she might be sitting on a rustic seat in the yard, but every few minutes she would get down on her knees and very solemnly examine the ground beneath her.

The Captain was a man of much learning and delivered brilliant addresses to the crowds who gathered about him in the Asylum grounds; but the Naturalist frequently met him on the slopes of Betsy Bell, with rag sashes at his waist and knees and a stick for a sword, posting and challenging his "sentries" in stentorian tones.

A man had been in an asylum for a number of years, when the doctor came to him one day and said, "Now, sit down and write a letter to your people and tell them you are well and will start home tomorrow." When he had finished the letter according to the doctor's directions and had wet the stamp to put it on the envelope, it slipped from his hand and landed on a bug crawling along the floor. The man looked on bewildered while the stamp slowly crossed the floor and climbed the op

posite wall, then he tore up the letter and said aloud to himself, "Tain't no use; I'm worse off than ever!"

BETSY BELL AND MARY GRAY

These were not two popular pupils, but small, conical mountains, little more than hills, standing together like sentinels just south of Staunton in the middle of the great Valley of the Shenandoah. If they had been in Mexico, their volcanic origin would have passed unchallenged; but they had nothing to do with eruptions. They were simple masses of chert that remained in this form after the softer limestone had been dissolved and worn away: the handiwork of water-not of fire. It relieved the monotony to have mountains so near, even if they were small, and many a pleasant journey was made to the top of them and beyond.

STUDY PERIOD

Soon after supper, the girls would be seen drifting in to the study hall by twos and threes from various directions, dressed as negligently as allowable and carrying an alarm clock in one hand and a pile of books in the other. The clock was intended to prevent them from devoting too much time to one sub

ject, and also from remaining a single minute over the regulation two-hour period. Occasionally, when an unpopular teacher was on the throne, it was used for less laudable purposes. The Naturalist really knew very little about what happened in study hall, since he was not called upon to take charge of it, and he cared still less as long as his pupils knew their lessons; which was almost invariably the case. A short season of liberty was allowed between study period and bedtime, and this gave the hall monitors more trouble than all the rest of the day together. At ten, following the good example of Wesley, lights were ordered out, but this did not mean that all the fun was necessarily over. The teachers would have had to have eyes like cats or owls and ears like jack rabbits to find out what went on after that.