influence upon the elevation of the world hardly dreamed of as yet even by its most devoted students, Eben Tourjee returned to America from years of musical study in the great Conservatories of Europe.  Knowing from personal observation the difficulties that lie in the way of American students, especially of young and inexperienced girls who seek to obtain a musical education abroad, battling as they must, not only with foreign customs and a foreign language, but exposed to dangers, temptations and disappointments, he determined to found in America a music school that should be unsurpassed in the world.  Accepting the judgment of the great masters, Mendelsshon, David, and Joachim, that the conservatory system was the best possible system of musical instruction, doing for music what a college of liberal arts does for education in general, Dr. Tourjee in 1853, with what seems to have been large and earnest faith, and most entire devotion, took the first public steps towards the accomplishment of his purpose.  During the long years his plan developed step by step.  In 1870 the institution was chartered under its present name in Boston.  In 1881 its founder deeded to it his entire personal property, and by a deed of trust gave the institution into the hands of a Board of Trustees to be perpetuated forever as a Christian Music School.

[Illustration:  The Dining Hall]

In the carrying out of his plan to establish and equip an institution that should give the highest musical culture, Dr. Tourjee has been compelled, in order that musicians educated here should not be narrow, one-sided specialists only, but that they should be cultured men and women, to add department after department, until to-day under the same roof and management there are well equipped schools of Music, Art, Elocution, Literature, Languages, Tuning, Physical Culture, and a home with the safeguards of a Christian family life for young women students.

[Illustration:  The Cabinet]

When, in 1882, the institution moved from Music Hall to its present quarters in Franklin Square, in what was the St. James Hotel, it became possessed of the largest and best equipped conservatory buildings in the world.  It has upon its staff of seventy-five teachers, masters from the best schools of Europe.  During the school year ending June 29, 1884, students coming from forty-one states and territories of the Union, from the British Provinces, from England and from the Sandwich Islands, have received instruction there.  The growth of this institution, due in such large measure to the courage and faith of one man, has been remarkable, and it stands to-day self-supporting, without one dollar of endowment, carrying on alone its noble work, an institution of which Boston, Massachusetts and America may well be proud.  From the first its invitation has been without limitation.  It began with a firm belief that “what it is in the nature of a man or woman to become, is a Providential