Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

93 страница из 121

With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a Promenade along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed and plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in this front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent de luxe with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it.

Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw Dr. or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George, we later learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper table as one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Sistie, Buzzie.”

Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady improvement of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the people who came to teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new undertakings. He planned incessantly to stir not only our souls but our minds. We came to expect new ideas at each successive session and were never disappointed if sometimes a little bewildered. Behind all these various undertakings was the steadying hand of Lewis Miller, the silent partner, who had begun by spying out the land, establishing a community, laying the foundations for the Institution as it exists today—a center of democratic, Christian culture.