lady to give a few thousands of dollars to start a medical college and hospital for women in New York.  She said before making bequests she always consulted her minister and her Bible.  He told her there was nothing said in the Bible about colleges for women.  I said, ’Tell him he is mistaken.  If he will turn to 2 ’Chron. xxxiv. 22, he will find that when Josiah, the king, sent the wise men to consult Huldah, the prophetess, about the book of laws discovered in the temple, they found Huldah in the college in Jerusalem, thoroughly well informed on questions of state, while Shallum, her husband, was keeper of the robes.  I suppose his business was to sew on the royal buttons.’  But in spite of this Scriptural authority, the rich lady gave thirty thousand dollars to Princeton and never one cent for the education of her own sex.

“Of all the voices to which these walls have echoed for over half a century, how few remain to tell the story of the early days, and when we part, how few of us will ever meet again; but I know we shall carry with us some new inspiration for the work that still remains for us to do.  Though many of us are old in years, we may still be young in heart.  Women trained to concentrate all their thoughts on family life are apt to think—­when their children are grown up, their loved ones gone, their servants trained to keep the domestic machinery in motion—­that their work in life is done, that no one needs now their thought and care, quite forgetting that the hey-day of woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.

“Or, perhaps, the pressing cares of family life ended, the woman may awake to some slumbering genius in herself for art, science, or literature, with which to gild the sunset of her life.  Longfellow’s beautiful poem, ‘Morituri Salutamus,’ written for a similar occasion to this, is full of hope and promise for all of us.  He says: 

    “’Something remains for us to do or dare;
    Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear. 
    Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
    Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
    Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
    When each had numbered more than four-score years. 
    And Theophrastus, at three-score and ten,
    Had but begun his Characters of Men;
    Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
    At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
    Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
    Completed Faust when eighty years were past. 
    These are indeed exceptions; but they show
    How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow