We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, hut no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About
four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had
been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole
performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administered an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our
separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after
supper "whether we were able to or not.''
Whenever we had chances to write, we took, of course, large
themes, usually from the Greek because they were the most stirring to
the imagination. The Greek oration I gave at our Junior Exhibition
was written„with infinite pains and taken to the Greek professor in Beloit College that there might be no mistakes, even after the Rockford
College teacher and the most scholarly clergyman in town had both
passed upon it. The oration upon Bellerophon and his successful fight
with the Minotaur, contended that social evils could only be overcome
by him who soared above them into idealism, as Bellerophon mounted
upon the winged horse Pegasus, had slain the earthy dragon.
There were practically no Economics taught in women's colleges
at least in the fresh-water ones —thirty years ago, although we painstakingly studied "Mental'' and "Moral" Philosophy, which, though
far from dry in the classroom, became the subject of more spirited discussion outside, and gave us a clew for animated rummaging in the
little college library. Of course we read a great deal of Ruskin and
Browning, and liked the most abstruse parts the best; but like the famous gentleman who talked prose without knowing it, we never
dreamed of connecting them with our philosophy. My genuine interest
was history, partly because of a superior teacher, and partly because my
father had always insisted upon a certain amount of historic reading
ever since he had paid me, as a little girl, five cents a "Life" for each
Plutarch hero I could intelligently report to him, and twenty-five cents
for every volume of Irving's "Life of Washington."
When we started for the long vacations, a little group of five would
vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's "Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire." When we returned at the opening of school and