ley's
sixth president was inaugurated. Of the five who preceded President
Pendleton, only Miss Hazard served more than six years, and even
Miss Hazard's term of eleven years was broken by more than one
long absence because of illness.

It is useless to deny that this lack of administrative continuity
had its disadvantages, yet no one who watched the growth and
development of Wellesley during her first forty years could fail
to mark the genuine progression of her scholarly ideal. Despite
an increasingly hampering lack of funds--poverty is not too strong
a word--and the disconcerting breaks and changes in her presidential
policy, she never took a backward step, and she never stood still.
The Wellesley that Miss Freeman inherited was already straining
at its leading strings and impatient of its boarding-school horizons;
the Wellesley that Miss Shafer left was a college in every modern
acceptation of the term, and its academic prestige has been confirmed
and enhanced by each successive president.

Of these six women who were called to direct the affairs of Wellesley
in her first half century, Miss Ada L. Howard seems to have been
the least forceful; but her position was one of peculiar difficulty,
and she apparently took pains to adjust herself with tact and
dignity to conditions which her more spirited successors would
have found unbearably galling. Professor George Herbert Palmer,
in his biography of his wife, epitomizes the early situation when
he says that Mr. Durant "had, it is true, appointed Miss Ada L. Howard
president; but her duties as an executive officer were nominal
rather than real; neither his disposition, her health, nor her
previous training allowing her much power."

Miss Howard was a New Hampshire woman, the daughter of William
Hawkins Howard and Adaline Cowden Howard. Three of her great
grandfathers were officers in the War of the Revolution. Her father
is said to have been a good scholar and an able teacher as well
as a scientific agriculturist, and her mother was "a gentlewoman
of sweetness, strength and high womanhood." When their daughter
was born, the father and mother were living in Temple, a village of
Southern New Hampshire not very far from Jaffrey. The little girl
was taught by her father, and was later sent to the academy at
New Ipswich, New Hampshire, to the high school at Lowell, and to
Mt. Holyoke Seminary, where she was graduated. After leaving
Mt. Holyoke, she taught at Oxfor