Mr. Kirk Munroe to the Round Table Order.
My Dear Fellow-members of the Round Table:
I have just returned from a visit that I wish every one of you might have made with me. It was to the Good Will Farm away down in the State of Maine. There I spent two happy days, and from there I have come away filled with enthusiasm for the most splendid charity of which I have any knowledge. If you could only see what I have seen, and hear what I have heard, that manual training-school that we are proposing to build for the Good Will boys some time would long since have been built and in active operation. As you can't see it, and probably know just as little about it as I did before going there, which was practically nothing at all, I am going to try and give you a slight idea of what the Good Will Farm is, and what it is doing.
The man who conceived the idea of Good Will Farm, and has made it his life-work, is the Rev. G. W. Hinckley, a splendid, manly, whole-souled Christian, who when he was a boy had as a playmate the son of a very poor widow. This woman went away from home every day to work after giving her boy his breakfast. Then she locked the house, and left the boy to shift for himself outside until she came home at night and prepared the second and only other meal of the day. Between those two meals the boy used to get awfully hungry, and one day he was caught with his hand in a workman's dinner pail. For this he was sent to a State reform school, from which he emerged three years later a thorough-going young criminal, ruined for life in body and mind. Distressed at the sad fate of his young playmate, Mr. Hinckley then and there declared his intention of devoting all the energies of his life to the saving of destitute boys from reform schools. By years of hard work he laid up $2000, with which, less than six years ago, he purchased a farm of 240 acres on the upper Kennebec River in Maine, about midway between the cities of Waterville and Skowhegan. Here, in an old farm-house, he began his work with three boys. He had no source of income, and the work is carried on entirely by voluntary subscriptions. These come from everywhere, and generally from strangers, of whom Mr. Hinckley has had no previous knowledge.
To-day Good Will Farm owns, besides the original farm-house, which has been wholly rebuilt, five handsome cottages, each in charge of a matron, and in each of which fifteen boys between eight and sixteen years of age find a comfortable, happy home. There are now seventy-six boys, most of them orphans, many without a relative in the world, and nearly all of them of American parentage, living, working, and growing up to a useful manhood amid the splendid influences of this farm. Each of the cottages in which these boys live has cost $3000, and has been presented as a free gift to the farm either by individuals or by societies, such as the Christian Endeavor Society of Maine, who presented the one that is named after it, and in which I was lodged.
Beside these cottages there is a splendid brick school building that cost $20,000, which was presented by two Maine ladies as a memorial to their brother.