It is certain that President Seelye deserves all the appreciation and affectionate regard he received.  He has won his laurels and he needs the rest which only resignation could bring.  The college is equally fortunate in securing as his successor, Marion LeRoy Burton, who in the coming years may lead the way through broader paths, to greater heights, always keeping President Seelye’s ideal of the truly womanly type, in a distinctively woman’s college.

As the Rev. Dr. John M. Greene writes me (the clergyman who suggested to Sophia Smith that she give her money to found a college for women, and who at eighty-five years has a perfectly unclouded mind):  “I want to say that my ambition for Smith College is that it shall be a real women’s college.  Too many of our women’s colleges are only men’s colleges for women.”

I desire now to add my tribute to that noble woman, Sophia Smith of Hatfield, Massachusetts.

On April 18, 1796, the town of Hatfield, in town meeting assembled, “voiced to set up two schools, for the schooling of girls four months in the year.”  The people of that beautiful town seemed to have heard the voice of their coming prophetess, commissioned to speak a word for woman’s education, which the world has shown itself ready to hear.

In matters of heredity, Sophia Smith was fortunate.  Her paternal grandmother, Mary Morton, was an extraordinary woman.  After the death of her husband, she became the legal guardian of her six sons, all young, cared for a large farm, and trained her boys to be useful and respected in the community.

Sophia Smith was born in Hatfield, August 27, 1796; just six months before Mary Lyon was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, about seventeen miles distant.  Sophia remembered her grandmother and said:  “I looked up to my grandmother with great love and reverence.  She, more than once, put her hands on my head and said, ’I want you should grow up, and be a good woman, and try to make the world better.’” And her mother was equally religious, efficient, kind to the poor, sympathetic but not impulsive.  Sophia lived in a country farmhouse near the Connecticut River for sixty-eight years.  She was sadly hampered physically.  One of the historians of Hatfield writes me: 

Her infirmity of deafness was troublesome to some extent when she was young, making her shy and retiring.  At forty she was absolutely incapable of hearing conversation.  She also was lame in one foot and had a withered hand.  In spite of this, I think she was an active and spirited girl, about like other girls.  She was very fond of social intercourse, especially later in life when my father knew her, but this intercourse was confined to a small circle.  Doctor Greene speaks of her timidity also.  I know of no traditions about her girlhood.  As an example of the thrift of the Smiths, or perhaps I should say, their exactness in all business dealings, my father says that Austin Smith never asked