Part 2

In that spirit she went on, and in that spirit girls who had been her pupils gave of their little stipends earned by teaching, and the mothers of girls gave of the money earned by selling eggs and braiding palm-leaf hats.

"Don't think any gift too small," said Miss Lyon. "I want the twenties and the fifties, but the dollars and the half-dollars, with prayer, go a long way."

So Mount Holyoke was built on faith and prayer and the gifts of the many who believed that the time cried out for a means of educating girls who longed for a better training. One hard-working farmer with five sons to educate gave a hundred dollars. "I have no daughters of my own," he said, "but I want to help give the daughters of America the chance they should have along with the boys." Two delicate gentlewomen who had lost their little property in the panic, earned with their own hands the money they had pledged to the college.

Even Miss Lyon's splendid optimism had, however, some chill encounters with smallmindedness in people who were not seldom those of large opportunities. Once when she had journeyed a considerable distance to lay her plans before a family of wealth and influence in the community, she returned to her friends with a shade of thought on her cheerful brow. "Yes, it is all true, just as I was told," she said as if to herself. "They live in a costly house, it is full of costly things, they wear costly clothes--but oh, they're _little bits of folks_!"

Miss Lyon, herself, gave to the work not only her entire capital of physical strength and her gifts of heart and mind, but also her small savings, which had been somewhat increased by Mr. White's prudent investments. And for the future she offered her services on the same conditions as those of the missionary--the means of simple livelihood and the joy of the work.

"Mount Holyoke is designed to cultivate the missionary spirit among its pupils," declared an early circular, "that they may live for God _and do something_."

Always Miss Lyon emphasized the ideal of an education that should be a training for service. To this end she decided upon the expedient of coöperative housework to reduce running expenses, to develop responsibility, and to provide healthful physical exercise. Long before the day of gymnasiums and active sports, this educator recognized the need of balanced development of physical as well as mental habits.

"We need to introduce wise and healthy ideals not only into our minds, but into our muscles," she said. "Besides, there is no discipline so valuable as that which comes from fitting our labors into the work of others for a common good."

One difficulty after another was met and vanquished. When the digging for the foundation of the first building was actually under way, quicksand was discovered and another location had to be chosen. Then it appeared that the bricks were faulty, which led to another delay. After the work was resumed and all was apparently going well, the walls suddenly collapsed. "Then," said the man in charge, "I did dread to see Miss Lyon. Now, thought I, she will be discouraged."

As he hurried towards the ruins, however, whom should he meet but Miss Lyon herself, smiling radiantly! "How fortunate it is that it happened while the men were at breakfast!" she exclaimed. "I understand that no one has been injured!"

The corner-stone was laid on a bright October day that seemed to have turned all the gray chill of the dying year into a golden promise of budding life after the time of frost.

"The stones and brick and mortar speak a language which vibrates through my soul," said Miss Lyon. "I have indeed lived to see the time when a body of gentlemen have ventured to lay the corner-stone of an edifice which will cost about fifteen thousand dollars--and for an institution for women! Surely the Lord hath remembered our low estate. The work will not stop with this foundation. Our enterprise may have to struggle through embarrassments for years, but its influence will be felt."

How lovingly she watched the work go on! When the interior was under way, how carefully she considered each detail of closets, shelves, and general arrangements for comfort and convenience! When the question of equipment became urgent, how she worked to create an interest that should express itself in gifts of bedroom furnishings, curtains, crockery, and kitchen-ware, as well as books, desks, chairs, and laboratory material! All sorts and conditions of contributions and donations were welcomed. One was reminded of the way pioneer Harvard was at first supported by gifts of "a cow or a sheep, corn or salt, a piece of cloth or of silver plate." Four months before the day set for the opening, not a third of the necessary furnishing had come in.

"Everything that is done for us now," cried Miss Lyon, "seems like giving bread to the hungry and cold water to the thirsty!"

On the eighth of November, 1837, the day that Mount Holyoke opened its door, all was excitement in South Hadley. Stages and private carriages had for two days been arriving with road-weary, but eager, young women. The sound of hammers greeted their ears. It appeared that all the men, young and old, of the countryside had been pressed into service. Some were tacking down carpet or matting, others were carrying trunks, unloading furniture, and putting up beds. Miss Lyon seemed to be everywhere, greeting each new-comer with a word that showed that she already knew her as an individual, putting the shy and homesick girls to work, taking a cup of tea to one who was overtired from her journey, and directing the placing of furniture and the unpacking of supplies.

It might well have seemed to those first arrivals that they must live through a period of preparation before a reluctant beginning of regular work could be achieved, but in the midst of all the noise of house-settling and the fever of uncompleted entrance examinations the opening bell sounded on schedule time and classes began at once. What seemed, at first glance, hopeless confusion became ordered and stimulating activity through the generalship and inspiration of one woman whose watchword was: "Do the best you can _now_. Do not lose one golden opportunity for doing by merely getting ready to do something. Always remember that what ought to be done can be done."

This spirit of assured power--the will to do--became the spirit of those who worked with her, and was in time recognized as "the Mount Holyoke spirit."

"I can see Miss Lyon now as vividly as if it were only yesterday that I arrived, tired, hungry, and fearful, into the strange new world of the seminary," said a white-haired grandmother, her spectacles growing misty as she looked back across the sixty-odd years that separated her from the experiences that she was recalling.

"Tell me what you remember most about her," urged her vivacious granddaughter, a Mount Holyoke freshman, home for her Christmas vacation. "Was she really such a wonder as they all say?"

"Many pictures come to me of Miss Lyon that are much more vivid than those of people I saw yesterday," pondered the grandmother. "But it was, I think, in morning exercises in seminary hall that she impressed us most. Those who listened to her earnest words and looked into her face alight with feeling could not but remember. Her large blue eyes looked down upon us as if she held us all in her heart. What was the secret of her power! My dear, she _was power_. All that she taught, she was. And so while her words awakened, her example--the life-giving touch of her life--gave power to do and to endure."

The young girl's bright face was turned thoughtfully towards the fire, but the light that shone in her eyes was more than the reflected glow from the cheerful logs. "It is good to think that a woman can live like that in her work," she ventured softly.

The grandmother's face showed an answering glow. "There are some things that cannot grow old and die," she said. "One of them is a spirit like Mary Lyon's. When they told us that she had died, we knew that only her bodily presence had been removed. She still lived in our midst--we heard the ring of her voice in the words we read, in the words our hearts told us she would say; we even heard the ring of her laugh! And to-day you may be sure that the woman-pioneer who had the faith to plant the first college for women in America, lives by that faith, not only in her own Mount Holyoke, but in the larger lives of all the women who have profited by her labors."

"THE PRINCESS" OF WELLESLEY: ALICE FREEMAN PALMER

Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever.

TENNYSON.

"THE PRINCESS" OF WELLESLEY

This is the story of a princess of our own time and our own America--a princess who, while little more than a girl herself, was chosen to rule a kingdom of girls. It is a little like the story of Tennyson's "Princess," with her woman's kingdom, and very much like the happy, old-fashioned fairy-tale.

We have come to think it is only in fairy-tales that a golden destiny finds out the true, golden heart, and, even though she masquerades as a goose-girl, discovers the "kingly child" and brings her to a waiting throne. We are tempted to believe that the chance of birth and the gifts of wealth are the things that spell opportunity and success. But this princess was born in a little farm-house, to a daily round of hard work and plain living. That it was also a life of high thinking and rich enjoyment of what each day brought, proved her indeed a "kingly child."

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous!" said the sage of Concord. So it was with little Alice Freeman. As she picked wild strawberries on the hills, and climbed the apple-tree to lie for a blissful minute in a nest of swaying blossoms under the blue sky, she was, as she said, "happy all over." The trappings of royalty can add nothing to one who knows how to be royally happy in gingham.

But Alice was not always following the pasture path to her friendly brook, or running across the fields with the calling wind, or dancing with her shadow in the barn-yard, where even the prosy hens stopped pecking corn for a minute to watch. She had work to do for Mother. When she was only four, she could dry the dishes without dropping one; and when she was six, she could be trusted to keep the three toddlers younger than herself out of mischief.

"My little daughter is learning to be a real little mother," said Mrs. Freeman, as she went about her work of churning and baking without an anxious thought.

It was Sister Alice who pointed out the robin's nest, and found funny turtles and baby toads to play with. She took the little brood with her to hunt eggs in the barn and to see the ducks sail around like a fleet of boats on the pond. When Ella and Fred were wakened by a fearsome noise at night, they crept up close to their little mother, who told them a story about the funny screech-owl in its hollow-tree home.

"It is the ogre of mice and bats, but not of little boys and girls," she said.

"It sounds funny now, Alice," they whispered. "It's all right when we can touch you."

When Alice was seven a change came in the home. The father and mother had some serious talks, and then it was decided that Father should go away for a time, for two years, to study to be a doctor.

"It is hard to be chained to one kind of life when all the time you are sure that you have powers and possibilities that have never had a chance to come out in the open," she heard her father say one evening. "I have always wanted to be a doctor; I can never be more than a half-hearted farmer."

"You must go to Albany now, James," said the dauntless wife. "I can manage the farm until you get through your course at the medical college; and then, when you are doing work into which you can put your whole heart, a better time must come for all of us."

"How can you possibly get along?" he asked in amazement. "How can I leave you for two years to be a farmer, and father and mother, too?"

"There is a little bank here," she said, taking down a jar from a high shelf in the cupboard and jingling its contents merrily. "I have been saving bit by bit for just this sort of thing. And Alice will help me," she added, smiling at the child who had been standing near looking from father to mother in wide-eyed wonder. "You will be the little mother while I take father's place for a time, won't you, Alice?"

"It will be cruelly hard on you all," said the father, soberly. "I cannot make it seem right."

"Think how much good you can do afterward," urged his wife. "The time will go very quickly when we are all thinking of that. It is not hard to endure for a little for the sake of 'a gude time coming'--a better time not only for us, but for many besides. For I know you will be the true sort of doctor, James."

Alice never quite knew how they did manage during those two years, but she was quite sure that work done for the sake of a good to come is all joy.

"I owe much of what I am to my milkmaid days," she said.

She was always sorry for children who do not grow up with the sights and sounds of the country. "One is very near to all the simple, real things of life on a farm," she used to say. "There is a dewy freshness about the early out-of-door experiences, and a warm wholesomeness about tasks that are a part of the common lot. A country child develops, too, a responsibility--a power to do and to contrive--that the city child, who sees everything come ready to hand from a near-by store, cannot possibly gain. However much some of my friends may deplore my own early struggle with poverty and hard work, I can heartily echo George Eliot's boast:

"But were another childhood-world my share, I would be born a little sister there."

When Alice was ten years old, the family moved from the farm to the village of Windsor, where Dr. Freeman entered upon his life as a doctor, and where Alice's real education began. From the time she was four she had, for varying periods, sat on a bench in the district school, but for the most part she had taught herself. At Windsor Academy she had the advantage of a school of more than average efficiency.

"Words do not tell what this old school and place meant to me as a girl," she said years afterward. "Here we gathered abundant Greek, Latin, French, and mathematics; here we were taught truthfulness, to be upright and honorable; here we had our first loves, our first ambitions, our first dreams, and some of our first disappointments. We owe a large debt to Windsor Academy for the solid groundwork of education that it laid."

More important than the excellent curriculum and wholesome associations, however, was the influence of a friendship with one of the teachers, a young Harvard graduate who was supporting himself while preparing for the ministry. He recognized the rare nature and latent powers of the girl of fourteen, and taught her the delights of friendship with Nature and with books, and the joy of a mind trained to see and appreciate. He gave her an understanding of herself, and aroused the ambition, which grew into a fixed resolve, to go to college. But more than all, he taught her the value of personal influence.

"It is people that count," she used to say. "The truth and beauty that are locked up in books and in nature, to which only a few have the key, begin really to live when they are made over into human character. Disembodied ideas may mean little or nothing; it is when they are 'made flesh' that they can speak to our hearts and minds."

As Alice drove about with her father when he went to see his patients and saw how this true "doctor of the old school" was a physician to the mind as well as the body of those who turned to him for help, she came to a further realization of the truth: It is people that count.

"It must be very depressing to have to associate with bodies and their ills all the time," she ventured one day when her father seemed more than usually preoccupied. She never forgot the light that shone in his eyes as he turned and looked at her.

"We can't begin to minister to the body until we understand that spirit is all," he said. "What we are pleased to call _body_ is but one expression--and a most marvelous expression--of the hidden life

"that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."

It seemed to Alice that this might be a favorable time to broach the subject of college. He looked at her in utter amazement; few girls thought of wanting more than a secondary education in those days, and there were still fewer opportunities for them.

"Why, daughter," he exclaimed, "a little more Latin and mathematics won't make you a better home-maker! Why should you set your heart on this thing?"

"I must go, Father," she answered steadily. "It is not a sudden notion; I have realized for a long time that I cannot live my life--the life that I feel I have it within me to live--without this training. I want to be a teacher--the best kind of a teacher--just as you wanted to be a doctor."

"But, my dear child," he protested, much troubled, "it will be as much as we can manage to see one of you through college, and that one should be Fred, who will have a family to look out for one of these days."

"If you let me have this chance, Father," said Alice, earnestly, "I'll promise that you will never regret it. I'll help to give Fred his chance, and see that the girls have the thing they want as well."

In the end Alice had her way. It seemed as if the strength of her single-hearted longing had power to compel a reluctant fate. In June, 1872, when but a little over seventeen, she went to Ann Arbor to take the entrance examinations for the University of Michigan, a careful study of catalogues having convinced her that the standard of work was higher there than in any college then open to women.

A disappointment met her at the outset. Her training at Windsor, good as it was, did not prepare her for the university requirements. "Conditions" loomed mountain high, and the examiners recommended that she spend another year in preparation. Her intelligence and character had won the interest of President Angell, however, and he asked that she be granted a six-weeks' trial. His confidence in her was justified; for she not only proved her ability to keep up with her class, but steadily persevered in her double task until all conditions were removed.

The college years were "a glory instead of a grind," in spite of the ever-pressing necessity for strict economy in the use of time and money. Her sense of values--"the ability to see large things large and small things small," which has been called the best measure of education,--showed a wonderful harmony of powers. While the mind was being stored with knowledge and the intellect trained to clear, orderly thinking, there was never a "too-muchness" in this direction that meant a "not-enoughness" in the realm of human relationships. Always she realized that it is people that count, and her supreme test of education as of life was its "consecrated serviceableness." President Angell in writing of her said:

One of her most striking characteristics in college was her warm and demonstrative sympathy with her circle of friends. Her soul seemed bubbling over with joy, which she wished to share with the other girls. While she was therefore in the most friendly relations with all those girls then in college, she was the radiant center of a considerable group whose tastes were congenial with her own. Without assuming or striving for leadership, she could not but be to a certain degree a leader among these, some of whom have attained positions only less conspicuous for usefulness than her own. Wherever she went, her genial, outgoing spirit seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of cheerfulness and joy.

In the middle of her junior year, news came from her father of a more than usual financial stress, owing to a flood along the Susquehanna, which had swept away his hope of present gain from a promising stretch of woodland. It seemed clear to Alice that the time had come when she must make her way alone. Through the recommendation of President Angell she secured a position as teacher of Latin and Greek in the High School at Ottawa, Illinois, where she taught for five months, receiving enough money to carry her through the remainder of her college course. The omitted junior work was made up partly during the summer vacation and partly in connection with the studies of the senior year. An extract from a letter home will tell how the busy days went:

This is the first day of vacation. I have been so busy this year that it seems good to get a change, even though I do keep right on here at work. For some time I have been giving a young man lessons in Greek every Saturday. I have had two junior speeches already, and there are still more. Several girls from Flint tried to have me go home with them for the vacation, but I made up my mind to stay and do what I could for myself and the other people here. A young Mr. M. is going to recite to me every day in Virgil; so with teaching and all the rest I sha'n't have time to be homesick, though it will seem rather lonely when the other girls are gone and I don't hear the college bell for two weeks.

Miss Freeman's early teaching showed the vitalizing spirit that marked all of her relations with people.

"She had a way of making you feel 'all dipped in sunshine,'" one of her girls said.

"Everything she taught seemed a part of herself," another explained. "It wasn't just something in a book that she had to teach and you had to learn. She made every page of our history seem a part of present life and interests. We saw and felt the things we talked about."

The fame of this young teacher's influence traveled all the way from Michigan, where she was principal of the Saginaw High School, to Massachusetts. Mr. Henry Durant, the founder of Wellesley, asked her to come to the new college as teacher of mathematics. She declined the call, however, and, a year later, a second and more urgent invitation. Her family had removed to Saginaw, where Dr. Freeman was slowly building up a practice, and it would mean leaving a home that needed her. The one brother was now in the university; Ella was soon to be married; and Stella, the youngest, who was most like Alice in temperament and tastes, was looking forward hopefully to college.

But at the time when Dr. Freeman was becoming established and the financial outlook began to brighten, the darkest days that the family had ever known were upon them. Stella, the chief joy and hope of them all, fell seriously ill. The "little mother" loved this "starlike girl" as her own child, and looked up to her as one who would reach heights her feet could never climb. When she died it seemed to Alice that she had lost the one chance for a perfectly understanding and inspiring comradeship that life offered. At this time a third call came to Wellesley,--as head of the department of history,--and hoping that a new place with new problems would give her a fresh hold on joy, she accepted.

Into her college work the young woman of twenty-four put all the power and richness of her radiant personality. She found peace and happiness in untiring effort, and her girls found in her the most inspiring teacher they had ever known. She went to the heart of the history she taught, and she went to the hearts of her pupils.

"She seemed to care for each of us--to find each as interesting and worth while as if there were no other person in the world," one of her students said.