“Friends,” he said, in his rather careful, precise way, “I am here for a different reason than any.  When I was in America but a little time a Methodist preacher made himself my friend.  I could not speak English, only a few words.  He took me to his home.  He taught me to talk the American way.  He find me other friends, though I could do nothing at all for them to pay them back.  Now I am Christian—­real, not only baptized.  The young people of the church take me in to whatever they do.  They call me ‘Phil’ and never care that I am a foreigner, so when I heard about this Institute I say to myself, ’It is something strange to me, but I hear that many people like those in my church will be there.’  I cannot quite believe that, but it sounded good, and I wanted to come and see.  And now I know that many people are young people like those I first knew.  They treat me just the same.  It makes me love America much more; and if I could tell my people in the old country that all this good has come to me from the church, they could not believe it.  Still, it is true.  Everything I have to-day has come to me by goodness of Christian people.”

There were some half-embarrassed “Amens,” and more than one hitherto unsuspected cold required considerable attention.  All the way to breakfast Phil held embarrassed court, while his hand was shaken and his shoulder was thumped and he was told, solo and chorus, by all who could get near him, that “He’s all right!”—­“Who’s all right?” “Phil Khamis!”

But J.W. was walking slowly toward the dining hall, alone.  As he had listened to Phil, at first he thought, “Good old scout, he’s putting it over,” but by the time the Greek’s simple words were ended, J.W. was looking himself straight in the eye.  “Young fellow,” he was saying, “you have come mighty near feeling glad that you have had so many more advantages than this stranger, and yet can’t you see that what he says about himself is almost as true about you?  All you have to-day—­this Institute, your religion, your church, your friends, the kind of a home you have and are so proud of—­everything has come to you by what Phil calls the goodness of Christian people.”

And then it was breakfast time, with an imperative call on J.W. from the Fort Adams table for “that new yell we fixed up last night,” and the minutes in which he had talked with himself were for the time forgotten.  But the memory of them came back in the days after the Institute was itself a memory.

* * * * *

The Saturday night camp fire at this Institute, contrary to the usual custom, was not co-ed.  The boys went down to the lake shore and sat around a big fire on the sand.  The girls had their fire on the slope of a hill at the other edge of the campus.

Nor does this Institute care for too much praise of itself.  Its traditional spirit is to work more for outcomes than for the devices which produce complacency.  It stages only a few opportunities of telling “Why I like this Institute.”