My father always maintained that he distinctly remembered hearing the death of Napoleon announced in his presence when he was one year and a half old.

Is the humiliating difference between the instinctive selection of Napoleon and that of the rooster, one of temperament or sex?  In either case, it is significant enough to lead one to drop the subject.

Next to having been born in a university town, comes the advantage—­if it be an advantage—­of having spent one’s youth there.  Mr. Howells says that he must be a dull fellow who does not, at some time or other, hate his native village; and I must confess that I have not, at all stages of my life, held my present opinion of Andover.  There have been times when her gentle indifference to the preoccupations of the world has stung me, as all serenity stings restlessness.  There have been times when the inevitable limitations of her horizon have seemed as familiar as the coffin-lid to the dead.

[Illustration:  PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS’S STUDY.

Drawn from a photograph taken after Professor Phelps’s death, when the study had been somewhat dismantled.]

There was an epoch when her theology—­But, nevertheless, I certainly look back upon Andover Hill with a very gentle pleasure and heartfelt sense of debt.

It has been particularly asked of me to give some form to my recollections of a phase of local life which is now so obviously passing away that it has a certain historical interest.

That Andover remains upon the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not dispute; but the Andover of New England theology—­the Andover of a peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world and all that was therein—­will soon become an interesting wraith.

The life of a professor’s daughter in a university town is always a little different from the lives of other girls; but the difference seems to me—­unless she be by nature entirely alien to it—­in favor of the girl.  Were I to sum in one word my impressions of the influences of Andover life upon a robust young mind and heart, I should call them gentle.

As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying thought.  As soon as we began to feel, we were aware of a neighborhood that did not feel superficially; at least, in certain higher directions.  When we began to ask the “questions of life,” which all intelligent young people ask sooner or later, we found ourselves in a village of three institutions and their dependencies committed to the pursuit of an ideal of education for which no amount of later, or what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than Christian.

Such things tell.  Andover girls did not waltz, or suffer summer engagements at Bar Harbor, a new one every year; neither did they read Ibsen, or yellow novels; nor did they handle the French stories that are hidden from parents; though they were excellent French scholars in their day.