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done, and who really accomplished it during the next hve years. The

school was one of the earliest efforts for women's higher education in

the Mississippi Valley, and from the beginning was called "the Mount

Holyoke of the West.'' It reflected much of the missionary spirit of that

pioneer institution, and the proportion of missionaries among its early

graduates was almost as large as Mount Holyoke's own. In addition

there had been thrown about the founders of the early western school

the glamour of frontier privations, and the first students, conscious of

the heroic self-sacrifice made in their behalf, felt that each minute

of the time thus dearly bought must be conscientiously used. This inevitably fostered an atmosphere of intensity, a fever of preparation

which continued long after the direct making of it had ceased, and

which the later girls accepted, as they did the campus and the buildings, without knowing that it could have been otherwise.

There was, moreover, always present in the school a larger or

smaller group of girls who consciously accepted this heritage and persistently endeavored to fulfill its obligation. We worked in those early

years as if we really believed the portentous statement from Aristotle

which we found quoted in Boswell's "Johnson" and with which we

illuminated the wall of the room occupied by our Chess Club; it remained there for months, solely out of reverence, let us hope, for the

two ponderous names associated with it; at least I have enough confidence in human nature to assert that we never really believed that

"there is the same difference between the learned and the unlearned as

there is between the living and the dead." We were also too fond of

quoting Carlyle to the effect,

" 'Tis not to taste sweet things, but to do

noble and true things that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs."

As I attempt to reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group by

looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than a

plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I imagine more or

less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At any rate here it is for the

entertainment of the reader if not for his edification: "So much of our

time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep,

we find it difficult to have any experience at all." We did not, however, tamely accept such a state of affairs, for we made various and restless attempts to break through this dull obtuseness.

k At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous

"Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium.