1 66 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



The boys and girls were not allowed to mingle 

 freely except during recreation hours and after 

 Sunday chapel; and no scandal and few breaches 

 of social discipline occurred during the four years 

 of my stay. 



President A. S. Welch was a keen, cultivated 

 gentleman, of very pleasant manners, patient 

 under defeat and usually able to turn defeat into 

 victory. That he successfully built an excellent 

 college out on the lonely, wind-swept prairies by 

 the track of an uncompleted railway, marks him as 

 a great organizer. That he was able to govern and 

 mould that mass of crude boys and girls and inex- 

 perienced professors picked up at first almost 

 at random, as they had to be into an efficient 

 educational institution, proves him a man of rare 

 executive ability. Had his lot been cast in a larger 

 field and in a later time, President Welch would 

 have been accounted by posterity one of the great 

 college presidents of America. 



President Welch organized and conducted the 

 first Farmers' Institutes in the United States. As- 

 sociated with him was Mrs. Ellen Tupper "The 

 Bee Woman " Professors Jones, Mathews, 

 Bessey and Roberts, and our experiences were 

 those of pioneers. On one occasion after an even- 

 ing meeting at Council Bluffs, Iowa, the President 



