ollege
girls one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence, the women
who were the experiment and who lived the romance must write it down.

For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at
the threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant. Inevitably
those forty years before the fire of 1914 will go down in her
history as a period apart. Already for her freshmen the old college
hall is a mythical labyrinth of memory and custom to which they
have no clue. New happiness will come to the hill above the lake,
new beauty will crown it, new memories will hallow it, but--they
will all be new. And if the coming generations of students are
to realize that the new Wellesley is what she is because her
ideals, though purged as by fire, are still the old ideals; if they
are to understand the continuity of Wellesley's tradition, we who
have come through the fire must tell them the story.

II.

On Wednesday, November 25, 1914, the workmen who were digging
among the fire-scarred ruins at the extreme northeast corner of
old College Hall unearthed a buried treasure. To the ordinary
treasure seeker it would have been a thing of little worth,--a rough
bowlder of irregular shape and commonplace proportions,--but
Wellesley eyes saw the symbol. It was the first stone laid in
the foundations of Wellesley College. There was no ceremony when
it was laid, and there were no guests. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fowle
Durant came up the hill on a summer morning--Friday, August 18, 1871,
was the day--and with the help of the workmen set the stone in place.

A month later, on the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, 1871,
the corner stone was laid, by Mrs. Durant, at the northwest corner
of the building, under the dining-room wing; it is significant that
from the foundations up through the growth and expansion of all
the years, women have had a hand in the making of Wellesley.
In September, as in August, there were no guests invited, but at
the laying of the corner stone there was a simple ceremony; each
workman was given a Bible, by Mr. Durant, and a Bible was placed
in the corner stone. On December 18, 1914, this stone was uncovered,
and the Bible was found in a tin box in a hollow of the stone.
As most of the members of the college had scattered for the Christmas
vacation, only a little group of people gathered about the place
where, forty-three years before, Mrs. Durant had laid the stone.
Mrs. Durant was too ill to be