art. As untiring friend, he performed innumerable delicate acts of kindness and of love. Wellesley students of those days remember him unpacking books for the library, hanging pictures where all might enjoy them, carrying fruit to the sick, ordering beef tea between meals for the delicate, suggesting masques and poetic contests, and so on ad infinitum.

Miss Howard in the meanwhile was in the difficult position of the nominal captain, who is in fact only a lieutenant. Yet she held it with true self-respect, honoring the fiery genius of her leader, if she could not always follow its more startling flights; and not hesitating to withstand him in his most positive plans, if her long practical experience suggested that it was necessary.

Mr. Durant died in October, 1881, prematurely worn out by his labors for the College. No more impressive tribute could be paid to those labors, on the intellectual side, than the expressed conviction. of President Pendleton and other leading spirits at Wellesley to-day, that no important academic advance has ever been made by the College which was not included in his farseeing plans.

Mrs. Durant, who from the beginning had served as secretary of the Board of Trustees, now assumed in addition her husband's more onerous duties as treasurer; and continued for many years to bear the heavy burden of the college finances. Henceforward she applied herself with redoubled earnestness to the fulfilment of those

high purposes for the institution, which she and Mr. Durant had formulated together, and to the manifestation of an endless lovingkindness to the students. She especially delighted to work through the Students' Aid Society, an organization for helping girls who have not sufficient funds for the four years' course. The list of her quiet gifts to the college can never be completed. A woman of entire consecration, of dauntless courage and of royal heart, she still lives in ripe and honored age, the flesh-andblood Alma Mater of thousands of Wellesley girls.

Mr. Durant's death was followed in a few weeks by the resignation of Miss Howard, who was obliged to retire on account of ill health. The Board of Trustees, as was

natural, had already been roused to greater activity and responsibility. But the institution was facing the most critical period in its history, unless we except that through which it is now passing. It had no general endowment; and the rates of board and tuition had been made extremely low in order to aid poor girls, for whose welfare both the founders were especially concerned. The student body had already increased to four hundred and fifty, and was steadily outgrowing its accommodations; although a new dormitory, providing for one hundred persons, had been opened in the preceding September. Many desirable applicants had to be turned away. While the requirements for admission and courses of study had become with each suc

THE PALMER MEMORIAL

Copyright by A. F. Nichols

ceeding year more completely collegiate, the government still harked back to boarding-school restrictions. The college was as yet comparatively little known to the

general public. Mr. Durant had brought to it many distinguished and delightful guests, from Longfellow and Ole Bull to the Emperor of Brazil; but its field of influence had had certain restrictions. The founder's very modesty, moreover, had hindered its full recognition. The great family, living as a rule in a degree of privacy which recalled the conditions in Tennyson's "Princess," must be transformed into a thoroughly organized institution, and established in the confidence of the widest possible public. But, thanks to the foresight and keen perception of the dying founder, a new, strong hand for the helm had already been selected. In his rare and affecting biography, Professor Palmer has described the induction of Alice Freeman, his future wife, then a delicate girl of twenty-six, into the responsibilities of the presidency. Miss Freeman was a graduate of Michigan University, and had already served. the College for two years as Professor of History.

It had been part of Mr. Durant's plan to provide a faculty composed wholly of women. In his difficult search for persons properly equipped, he seems to have looked first to Mount Holyoke. He had been fortunate, too, in finding those few pioneer scholars, not wholly college-bred, but enriched with whatever amount of academic train

ing they could wring or charm froma reluctant world, whom Wellesley will long honor and revere. They have been finely compared to hand-made lace, as contrasted with the prod