042
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042
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house in 1888, the policing of the campus brought student life in close touch with the head janitor. If the students chanted some appropriate air when John appeared to turn out the lights, the chances were that the lights would not go out too abruptly. If they invited John to their Thanksgiving "feed," they usually were privileged to wash their dishes in the steam down in the boiler room. When they graduated, they hunted for John when adieus to the campus were in order, and heard something like this: "Well, I don't see what the university is going to do for students next year. When your class is gone, there won't be anybody worth while around any more."
Old "U Hall" has withstood the vicissitudes and calumnies of time, and still is doing good service to the state. Condemned as physically unfit from its beginning, the building has undergone, from time to time, extensive repairs. The original foundation, chiefly of soft brown sandstone, was removed and a limestone foundation substituted. For months the building stood on jack-screws and, be it not forgotten, also on its complete system of inside cross walls, which extend from the basement to the roof. Three years ago its front walls were found to be bulging a few inches. The regents, with a retinue of architects and engineers, filed solemnly through the building, and the result is a series of steel uprights riveted through the building from south to north by steel cables, making it indubitably safe, and giving the exterior what Chancellor Avery describes as a "corduroy effect."
Inside it is much the same as of yore, except that the chapel, after being once remodelled was finally divided into two floors and further remodelled for class room purposes. The same old bell that summoned the first students to morning prayers—a bell now cracked and scarcely audible on the outskirts of the old campus—summons the younger, gayer, better dressed and housed students to convocation, or announces football victories. Dining the war it tolled the eleven o'clock angelus up to November 11, 1918.
The original campus covered four city blocks. Until 1886 University Hall was the sole edifice. The campus
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