ors and made it seem
a noble and womanly thing. "When, in her sweet and gracious
manner, she asked, 'How would you like to be on the circle to
scrape dinner dishes?' you straightway felt that no occupation
could be more noble than scraping those mussy plates."

"All that day," we are told, "confusion was inevitable. Mr. Durant
hovered about, excited, anxious, yet reassured by the enthusiasm
of the students, who entered with eagerness into the new world.
He superintended feeding the hungry, answered questions, and
studied with great keenness the faces of the girls who were entering
Wellesley College. In the middle of the afternoon it had been
discovered that no bell had been provided for waking the students,
so a messenger went to the village to beg help of Mrs. Horton
(the mother of the professor of Greek), who promptly provided
a large brass dinnerbell. At six o'clock the next morning two
students, side by side, walked through all the corridors, ringing
the rising-bell,--an act, as Miss Eastman says, symbolic of the
inner awakening to come to all those girls." Thirty-nine years
later, at the sound of a bell in the early morning, the household
were to awake to duty for the last time in the great building.
The unquestioning obedience, the prompt intelligence, the unconscious
selflessness with which they obeyed that summons in the dawn of
March 17, 1914, witness to that "inner awakening."

The early days of that first term were given over to examinations,
and it was presently discovered that only thirty of the three hundred
and fourteen would-be college students were really of college grade.
The others were relegated to a preparatory department, of which
Mr. Durant was always intolerant, and which was finally discontinued
in 1881, the year of his death.

Mr. Durant's ideals for the college were of the highest, and in
many respects he was far in advance of his times in his attitude
toward educational matters. He meant Wellesley to be a university
some day. There is a pretty story, which cannot be told too often,
of how he stood one morning with Miss Louise Manning Hodgkins,
who was professor of English Literature from 1877 to 1891, and
looked out over the beautiful campus.

"Do you see what I see?" he asked.

"No," was the quiet answer, for there were few who would venture
to say they saw the visions in his eyes.

"Then I will tell you," he said. "On that hill an Art School,
down there a Musical Conservato