the way of shade or fruitage. In the autumn of 1834, our master and mistress seemed very busy in outside matters, and the following spring found young maidens visiting the grounds. It was the opening of Wheaton Seminary. Our two trees seemed to be those of special attraction to the young people for the fruit we bore. But after a lapse of years we were sought for the shade we gave, and a seat was placed under our boughs, and many were the chats held there, mostly by the young maidens, but also by some grave teachers; and I can recall even exPrincipals, who were having overtures to leave the halls of Wheaton and go with the suitor to make a home with him either in New England or in foreign lands, and after a time these ladies ceased to come to our shades. They had been captured, and taken away.

But new attractions were presented, and, directly, about us was made a croquet ground, and many a group of youth resorted there for games. When weary of play, they would come to the seat and chat, as young girls do. After a time the playground seemed deserted for some new play, and we were left more to ourselves, and a conviction crept over us that we were not so attractive as in former years. Even our mistress would come and look at us with an anxious eye. We knew there was invisible trouble, but we could not tell her

what it was. She ordered one thing and then another, but all failed to arrest decay. The borers were doing their deadly work, and so we became unsightly and unfruitful, and our mistress gave the order for our removal. And we have just been uprooted, — but she has given us the promise that we shall be cremated, and that the Class of '91 shall be requested to sprinkle our ashes about the apple trees on "Observatory Walk," that we may still live to cheer the Wheaton girls.

CHAPTER XIV

A CRISIS

DURING the last decade of the nineteenth century, great changes were taking place in the education of girls all over the world, which had to be reckoned with by every school in the land. The halfdozen years following 1894, when the Harvard Annex became Radcliffe College, and the President of Harvard University first signed the diplomas of its graduates, were probably the most strenuous years ever known in the history of every high-class school for girls in the United States. Every teacher in those schools at that time will acknowledge this, but the general public knew little about what was going on. A short explanation of the causes and effects of this crisis may not be out of place here.

Though admirably equipped colleges for women had already existed for more than thirty years, yet there had been a lurking doubt in most minds as to whether they really stood for a culture comparable to that of colleges for men. The girls who had hitherto been attracted to colleges were a picked class in a different sense from that in which college

boys are a picked class, they were highly intellectual girls. The colleges had already had a very appreciable effect on high-class boarding-schools, for the daughters of the mothers who in the middle of the nineteenth century had thronged these boarding-schools were often exactly those who grasped most eagerly the new opportunities for college training. High schools had sprung up everywhere in which preparation for college could be made without leaving home, and the very culture the mothers themselves had gained at the boardingschools had so refined the home life all over the country that one of the strong incentives to send the daughters to the same boarding-schools had been lost. Still, a college course for girls had by no means become the fashion, even in the case of highly endowed girls. It was questioned whether it left them quite as feminine as they ought to be, and in the same breath we were told that, after all, the college courses open to girls were only feminine reflections of masculine realities.

But when President Eliot countersigned the first Radcliffe diploma, all this was changed in the twinkling of an eye. The world at large did not observe the change, but every high-class girls' school in the country felt the shock within a year, though probably not all noticed the connection between the action at Harvard and the subsequent

ferment. The actual culture within the reach of girls was perhaps not greatly increased by the new arrangement, yet, when Harvard set its seal on that culture, it seemed to most people as if the goal had been reached at last, and that girls were no longer shut out from the highest education in the land. Then it became the fashion for girls to go to college.

It was not to Radcliffe alone, or chiefly, that the girls turned their faces, but to every other college in the land whose doors were open to women. All the girls whose brothers went to college began to demand a college course for themselves, whether they had any special love for study

or not.

Up to this time, very few of the best girls' schools had given much attention to the technicalities of college preparation. The girls who went to college usually fitted either in the large high schools, or in some specialized fitting-school situated in a college town. Occasionally, some gifted girl went from a seminary to college, but such a girl usually took the matter of fitting herself largely into her own hands, and entered college in triumph.

Now, suddenly, all these schools were asked to fit girls for Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe, etc., and they found they had no equipment for the purpose. To the uninitiated, it seemed as