"It was at Ashland that I first began to unfold," said Page afterward.

"Dear old Ashland!" Dr.Duncan, the President, was a clergyman whose pulpit oratory is still a tradition in the South, but, in addition to his religious exaltation, he was an exceedingly lovable, companionable, and stimulating human being.

Certainly there was no lack of the religious impulse.

"We have a preacher president," Page writes his mother, "a preacher secretary, a preacher chaplain, and a dozen preacher students and three or more preachers are living here and twenty-five or thirty yet-to-be preachers in college!" In this latter class Page evidently places himself; at least he gravely writes his mother--he was now eighteen--that he had definitely made up his mind to enter the Methodist ministry.

He had a close friend--Wilbur Fisk Tillett--who cherished similar ambitions, and Page one day surprised Tillett by suggesting that, at the approaching Methodist Conference, they apply for licensing as "local preachers" for the next summer.