Prof. Albert Salisbury, Superintendent Of Education.
ANNIVERSARY REPORTS.
BEREA COLLEGE.
Prof. W. E. C. Wright.
The seventeenth year of Berea College closed on June 30th with most satisfactory marks of the sustained usefulness and increasing importance of the school.
The Commencement festival really began with the joint exhibition of the Ladies’ Literary and Phi Delta Societies on Friday evening, before a large audience, in the chapel. The pupils of the lower schools gave their interesting exhibitions in the same place on Saturday evening. President Fairchild’s baccalaureate discourse on Sunday morning was a vigorous and comprehensive rehearsal of the religious and moral ideas of consecration to God and love toward all men, which this college has ever sought to impress on its students; his text, Phil. iv., 9, “Those things, which ye have both learned and received and heard and seen in me, do.” No Christian man could have heard it without feeling how supremely important for the educational regeneration of the South is such a spirit of religious earnestness.
On Tuesday evening the Literary Societies were addressed on the subject of “Progress,” by Col. Swope, who is the Internal Revenue Collector for this district, and a native of Kentucky.
On Wednesday came the final exercises, which gathered a great multitude from mountain and from plain. The season has been very rainy, but this was the most perfect of June days—its unclouded sun tempered by a cool breeze from the south. Soon after sunrise vehicles of every description, and saddle-horses carrying one, two or three passengers, began to pour in toward the Tabernacle, most visitors bringing luncheon for a noon-time picnic in the oak grove.