resting wraith.

The life of a professor's daughter in a university town is always a
little different from the lives of other girls; but the difference
seems to me--unless she be by nature entirely alien to it--in favor of
the girl. Were I to sum in one word my impressions of the influences
of Andover life upon a robust young mind and heart, I should call them
_gentle_.

As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying
thought. As soon as we began to feel, we were aware of a neighborhood
that did not feel superficially; at least, in certain higher
directions. When we began to ask the "questions of life," which all
intelligent young people ask sooner or later, we found ourselves in a
village of three institutions and their dependencies committed to the
pursuit of an ideal of education for which no amount of later, or
what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than
Christian.

Such things tell. Andover girls did not waltz, or suffer summer
engagements at Bar Harbor, a new one every year; neither did they read
Ibsen, or yellow novels; nor did they handle the French stories that
are hidden from parents; though they were excellent French scholars in
their day.

I do not even know that one can call them more "serious" than their
city sisters--for we were a merry lot; at least, _my_ lot were. But
they were, I believe, especially open-hearted, gentle-minded girls.

If they were "out of the world" to a certain extent, they were, to
another, out of the evil of it. As I look back upon the little
drama between twelve and twenty--I might rather say, between two and
twenty--Andover young people seem to me to have been as truly and
naturally innocent as one may meet anywhere in the world. Some of
these private records of girl-history were so white, so clear, so
sweet, that to read them would be like watching a morning-glory open.
The world is full, thank Heaven, of lovely girls; but though other
forms or phases of gentle society claim their full quota, I never saw
a lovelier than those I knew on Andover Hill.

One terrible tragedy, indeed, befell our little "set;" for we had our
sets in Andover, as well as they of Newport or New York.

A high-bred girl of exceptional beauty was furtively kissed one
evening by a daring boy (not a native of Andover, I hasten to
explain), and the furore which followed this unprecedented enormity
it would be impossible to describe to a member of more complica