Dedication

Busy though he was, the President prepared to go with Mrs. Coolidge to Mercersburg, Pa. It was there that his sons received their secondary schooling, at famed Mercersburg Academy. It was there that Mrs. Coolidge laid one of her many cornerstones, in June, 1924, for memorial chapel. The chapel has long since been finished. Calvin Coolidge Jr., Class of 1925, died of septic poisoning in Washington scarcely a month after his mother's visit at school. The dedicatory services were to be held on Headmaster William M. Irvine's 61st birthday. Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge were to be guests of Dr. and Mrs. Irvine, adding nothing to the ceremonies but their presence and their private feelings.

There was about the new chapel, however, that which made it appropriate for a President as well as a lost boy's father to be present at its dedication. It was a memorial to the 1,700 Mercersburg graduates who served in the War, 55 of whom died. Designed by that most fashionable of academic architects, Ralph Adams Cram of Boston, it bore in its belfry a carillon of 43 bells, first in Pennsylvania, second largest in the U. S., presented by President H. B. Swoope of the Mercersburg Alumni Association, who had supplied British bell-makers an extraordinary collection of metal scraps to be melted into music--a widow's mite of old Judea, ring money from 1,000 B C Switzerland, pieces of shell from Flanders, clinkers from Old Ironsides, a bit from Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock IV, from the Columbia which beat Sir Thomas from Dewey's Manila flagship Olympia, from Nelson's Trafalgar-flagship Victoria--even copper wire from the late Commander John Rodger's seaplane, the PN-9, which flew to Hawaii, and a shaving, bored, after it cracked itself in 1836 tolling for John Marshall, from the Liberty Bell.

Doubtless Mrs. Coolidge would recall the inscription on her cornerstone, and be pleased to find many more by the same author graven here and there within the edifice. The author was diminutive twinkle-eyed the Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke, retired patriarch of Princeton University and of U. S. letters, a close friend of Dr. Irvine. Never the nation's laureate, Dr. van Dyke was yet to have a work of his attended, upon its first public hearing, by the first lady and gentleman of the land. At the dedicatory services there was to be sung a new hymn,* the first verse of which came to Dr. van Dyke one fine morning last spring while he was knee-deep in his favorite troutstream. Forgetting line, flies, fish and footing, Dr. van Dyke fetched out a scrap of paper and wrote:

O Comrade of the Human Heart,

O Son of Love Divine, To Thy dear name we set apart

On this green hill, a shrine.

Later he added:

To all our learning lend Thy light, To all our work Thy Grace;

Help us to honor Thee aright Until we see Thy Face.

Oh Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Who died to make us free,

In youth and till our latest breath We'll trust and follow Thee.

*This hymn is not included in the new volume of inspirational short stories published last fortnight by Dr. van Dyke, The Golden Key (Scribner, $2).