n Waltham) from 1809 to 1846, and during
most of that time supplemented the small salary of a country minister
by receiving twelve or fourteen boys into his family to fit for
college. From time to time youths rusticated from Harvard were
also sent there to keep up college work."

"Mrs. Ripley was one of the most remarkable women of her generation.
Born in 1793, she very early began to show unusual intellectual
ability, and before she was seventeen she had become a fine Latin
scholar and had read also all the Odyssey in the original." Her
life-long friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes in praise of her:
"The rare accomplishments and singular loveliness of her character
endeared her to all.... She became one of the best Greek
scholars in the country, and continued in her latest years the
habit of reading Homer, the tragedians, and Plato. But her studies
took a wide range in mathematics, natural philosophy, psychology,
theology, and ancient and modern literature. Her keen ear was
open to whatever new facts astronomy, chemistry, or the theories
of light and heat had to furnish. Absolutely without pedantry,
she had no desire to shine. She was faithful to all the duties
of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminently hospitable
household wherein she was dearly loved. She was without appetite
for luxury or display or praise or influence, with entire
indifference to triffles.... As she advanced in life her
personal beauty, not remarked in youth, drew the notice of all."

There could have been no nobler, saner influence for an intellectual
boy than the companionship of this unusual woman, and if we are
to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story, we must begin with
Mrs. Ripley, for Mr. Durant often said that she had great influence
in inclining his mind in later life to the higher education of women.

From Waltham the young man went in 1837 to Harvard, where we hear
of him as "not specially studious, and possessing refined and
luxurious tastes which interfered somewhat with his pursuit of
the regular studies of the college." But evidently he was no
ordinary idler, for he haunted the Harvard Library, and we know
that all his life he was a lover of books. In 1841 he was graduated
from Harvard, and went home to Lowell to read law in his father's
office, where Benjamin F. Butler was at that time a partner.
The dilettante attitude which characterized his college years is
now no longer in evidence. He writes to a f