et this does not prevent me from being very weary and sorely
discouraged at times. To-night I am so tired I can hardly sit up
to write."

And from one who, as a young girl, was visiting at his country
house when the house was building, we have this vivid reminiscence:
"My first impression of Mr. Durant was, 'Here is the quickest
thinker'--my next--'and the keenest wit I have ever met.' Then
came the day when under the long walls that stood roofed but bare
in the solitude above Lake Waban, I sat upon a pile of plank, now
the flooring of Wellesley College, and listened to Mr. Durant.
I could not repeat a word he said. I only knew as he spoke and
I listened, the door between the seen and the unseen opened and
I saw a great soul and its quest, God's glory. I came back to
earth to find this seer, with his vision of the wonder that should
be, a master of detail and the most tireless worker. The same day
as this apocalypse, or soon after, I went with Mr. Durant up a
skeleton stairway to see the view from an upper window. The
workmen were all gone but one man, who stood resting a grimy hand
on the fair newly finished wall. For one second I feared to see
a blow follow the flash of Mr. Durant's eye, but he lowered rather
than raised his voice, as after an impressive silence he showed
the scared man the mark left on the wall and his enormity....
Life was keyed high in Mr. Durant's home, and the keynote was
Wellesley College. While the walls were rising he kept workman's
hours. Long before the family breakfast he was with the builders.
At prayers I learned to listen night and morning for the prayer
for Wellesley--sometimes simply an earnest 'Bless Thy college.'
We sat on chairs wonderful in their variety, but all on trial for
the ease and rest of Wellesley, and who can count the stairways
Mrs. Durant went up, not that she might know how steep the stairs
of another, but to find the least toilsome steps for Wellesley feet.

"Night did not bring rest, only a change of work. Letters came and
went like the correspondence of a secretary of state. Devotion
and consecration I had seen before, and sacrifice and self-forgetting,
but never anything like the relentless toil of those two who toiled
not for themselves. If genius and infinite patience met for
the making of Wellesley, side by side with them went the angels
of work and prayer; the twin angels were to have their shrine
in the college."

V.

On September 8, 1875,