Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were handed breathlessly down to us, and cherished with awe.  A lady of the village, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported to have refused nineteen offers of marriage.  Another, still plainly beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine theologues in one winter.  Neither of these ladies married.  We watched their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex, not easily to be understood by a man.  When we began to think how many times they might have married, the subject assumed sensational proportions.  In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied, regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace.  Each knew—­and knew that the rest knew—­that it was (to use the Andover phraseology) not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute, that an Andover girl passed through life alone.  This little social fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns, had mingled effects upon impressionable girls.  For the proportion of masculine society was almost Western in its munificence.

Perhaps it is my duty to say just here that, if honestly put to the question, I should admit that this proportion was almost too munificent for the methods of education then—­and still to an extent now—­in vogue.

A large Academy for boys, and a flourishing Seminary for young men, set across the village streets from two lively girls’ schools, gave to one observer of this little scholastic world her first argument for co-education.

I am confident that if the boys who serenaded (right manfully) under the windows of Abbott Academy or of “The Nunnery,” or who tied their lady’s colors to the bouquets that they tossed on balconies of professors’ houses, had been put, class to class, in competition with us, they would have wasted less time upon us; and I could not deny that if the girls who cut little holes in their fans through which one could look, undetected and unreproved, at one’s favorite Academy boy, on some public occasion, had been preparing to meet or pass that boy at Euclid or Xenophon recitation next morning, he would have occupied less of their fancy.  Intellectual competition is simpler, severer, and more wholesome than the unmitigated social plane; and a mingling of the two may be found calculated to produce the happiest results.

“Poor souls!” said a Boston lady once to me, upon my alluding to a certain literary club which was at that time occupying the enthusiasm of the Hill.  “Poor souls!  I suppose they are so starved for society!” We can fancy the amusement with which this comment would have been received if it had been repeated—­but it never was repeated till this moment—­in Andover.