As father talked I wondered how he ever got hold of so many facts.  He piled them up until my first address was swept away by the triumphs of art.  The only hope I had for the affirmative was in the closing fifteen minutes.  Fortunately for me, the judge was a bachelor and very much in love with a golden-haired, accomplished young woman who lived in a country home very near the schoolhouse, and was then in the audience.  In closing the debate I referred to father’s address in a complimentary manner, and then asked the judge to be seated in imagination on a knoll nearby.  On one side of that knoll I placed all my father had claimed for art, withholding nothing.  On the other side was the home of this Blue Grass belle.  I began a description of her home and personality.  I pictured “the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild-wood and every loved spot” the judge well knew.  I pictured the brook that ran through the meadow into the woodland and on down the valley, singing as it ran,

  “I wind about and in and out,
    With here a blossom sailing;
  Here and there a lusty trout,
    And here and there a grey-ling.”

When my time was half gone I felt I was gone too unless I could get a little nearer the heart of the judge.  Opening the door art had made to shut in the flowers of a lovely family I brought out the golden-haired girl.

Taking off the sun-bonnet of art, that the good-night kisses of the sinking sun might enrich her rosy cheeks and golden tresses, I sent her strolling down the winding walk hedged in by hawthorn and hyacinth to the water’s brink.  Here I gave her a cushion of blue-grass, and with the rising moon pouring its shimmering sheen upon the ripples at her feet, I sent her voice floating away on the evening air singing:  “Roll on silver moon, guide the traveler on his way.”  Here the audience cheered, the judge smiled and I felt encouraged.

With but two minutes left I had the shapely fingers of nature, take out the hair-pins of art and the golden tresses fall about the snowy neck of nature.  Then came the untying of the shoe-strings of art; off came the shoes and stockings of art, and the pretty feet of nature were dipping in the limpid stream.  I said, “Judge, the question is, which is the more attractive, the works of nature or the works of art?  With my father’s picture of steam engines, stage coaches, reapers, binders, mowing machines and every known triumph of art on one side; on the other the highest type of the world’s creation, a beautiful woman, the stars of nature stooping to kiss her brow, and laughing waters of nature leaping to kiss her feet; where your eyes would rest there let your decision be given.”

After the debate a friend said to me:  “It was that last home picture that saved you.”  My father who heard the remark said, “Yes, a picture of a red-headed girl washing her feet in a goose branch.”  I may add, I was careful after the contest not to get very near the young lady with whom I had taken such platform liberty.