scholarship and a courtly manner, the master builder of our College, under whose hand the little one has become a thousand and the small one a strong republic, has achieved the realization of his high ideal and is crowned with honour and affection.

He has made one ashamed of any but the highest motives, and has taught us that sympathy and love for mankind are the traits for which to strive.  The ideals of womanly life which he instilled will ever be held high before us.

There are many distinguished qualities which a college president must possess.  He must be idealist, creator, executor, financier, and scholar.  President Seelye—­is all these—­but he had another and a rarer gift which binds and links these qualities together, as the chain on which jewels are strung—­President Seelye had immense capacity for work and patient attention for details.  It is this unusual combination which has given us a great College, and has given to our president a unique position among educators.

I realize that I must at times have been rather a trying proposition to President Seelye for I was placed in an entirely new world, and having been almost wholly educated by my father, by Dartmouth professors, and by students of the highest scholarship, I never knew the mental friction and the averaging up and down of those accustomed to large classes.  I gained far more there than I gave, for I learned my limitations, or some of them, and to try to stick closely to my own work, to be less impulsive, and not offer opinions and suggestions, unasked, undesired, and in that early stage of the college, objectionable.  Still, President Seelye writes to me:  “I remember you as a very stimulating teacher of English Literature, and I have often heard your pupils, here and afterwards, express great interest in your instruction.”

The only “illuminating” incident in my three years at Smith College was owing to my wish to honour the graduating reception of the Senior class.  I pinned my new curtains carefully away, put some candles in the windows, leaving two young ladies of the second year to see that all was safe.  The house was the oldest but one in the town; it harboured two aged paralytics whom it would be difficult, if not dangerous, to remove.  Six students had their home there.  As my fire-guards heard me returning with my sister and some gentlemen of the town, they left the room, the door slammed, a breeze blew the light from the candles to the curtains, and in an instant the curtains were ablaze.

And now the unbelievable sequel.  The room seemed all on fire in five minutes.  Next, the overhead beam was blazing.  I can tell you that the fire was extinguished by those gentlemen, and no one ever knew we had been so near a conflagration until three years later when the kind lady of the house wrote to me:  “Dear Friend, did you ever have a fire in your room?  In making it over I found some wood badly scorched.”  I have the most reliable witnesses, or you would never have believed it.  In the morning my hostess said to the girls assembled at breakfast:  “Miss Sanborn is always rather noisy when she has guests, but I never did hear such a hullabaloo as she made last evening.”