She was just finishing it when her husband came in from his weekly meeting with the city fathers.  She told him all her plan, which he heartily endorsed, and practically helped by taking out his purse and giving her a generous sum of money for the trip, saying, “I wish, my dear, that I could go too, but I cannot leave my business this season of the year.  But I am only too glad that I can make money enough for you and Reuben to go.  I know of no better way to invest it for the future of our boy, God bless him!

“Ah!” replied Mrs. Tracy, her face all aglow with the joy of having her own thought so fully met, “would that more fathers thought so! but while some think only of a bank account, and the great majority think nothing of any account at all, only the few know the need of a child’s mind digesting money, so to speak, as it goes along.”

In a few days the arrangements were completed and Mrs. Tracy and her son left their home in Salem for Northampton.  Reuben quietly enjoyed the scenery all the way from Boston to Springfield.  In the forty minutes’ ride from Springfield to Northampton Mrs. Tracy had a delightful opportunity, which she well used, to show her boy the winding course of a river,—­the beautiful Connecticut—­as they followed it first on one side and then on the other.  When Reuben spied the house on Mount Holyoke he realized then that he saw his first mountain.  On making inquiries about the mountain with a house on it, on the other side of the river, the conductor told him that that was Mount Nonotuck, a peak of the Mount Tom range, which was nine hundred and fifty feet high.  He also told him that Nonotuck was the old Indian name for Northampton, which was just then coming in sight.

On arriving at the station uncle Edward met them with his carriage to convey them to his home on Round Hill.  On their way there they passed the fine building of Smith College, which particularly pleased Mrs. Tracy and caused her to say, partly to herself, “Happy, happy girls to have such privileges of college life.”  “What,” said Reuben, “girls go to college like boys? how funny!” When, after a moment or two of seeming abstraction, he said:  “That is what papa meant the other day when he said that girls were as good as boys and could learn just as well as they could, is’nt it?” But before Mrs. Tracy could answer him they had arrived at their destination.

The next day they took a drive around the town, or rather the city, since a short time before it had become such.  Its wealth of trees was a source of joy to them.