The holder of the Portfolio would never have ventured to come before the public if he had not counted among his resources certain papers belonging to the records of the Pansophian Society, which he can make free use of, either for the illustration of the narrative, or for a diversion during those intervals in which the flow of events is languid, or even ceases for the time to manifest any progress.  The reader can hardly have failed to notice that the old Anchor Tavern had become the focal point where a good deal of mental activity converged.  There were the village people, including a number of cultivated families; there were the visitors, among them many accomplished and widely travelled persons; there was the University, with its learned teachers and aspiring young men; there was the Corinna Institute, with its eager, ambitious, hungry-souled young women, crowding on, class after class coming forward on the broad stream of liberal culture, and rounding the point which, once passed, the boundless possibilities of womanhood opened before them.  All this furnished material enough and to spare for the records and the archives of the society.

The new Secretary infused fresh life into the meetings.  It may be remembered that the girls had said of her, when she was The Terror, that “she knew everything and didn’t believe anything.”  That was just the kind of person for a secretary of such an association.  Properly interpreted, the saying meant that she knew a great deal, and wanted to know a great deal more, and was consequently always on the lookout for information; that she believed nothing without sufficient proof that it was true, and therefore was perpetually asking for evidence where, others took assertions on trust.

It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror could accomplish in the course of a single season.  She found out what each member could do and wanted to do.  She wrote to the outside visitors whom she suspected of capacity, and urged them to speak at the meetings, or send written papers to be read.  As an official, with the printed title at the head of her notes, Pansophian society, she was a privileged personage.  She begged the young persons who had travelled to tell something of their experiences.  She had contemplated getting up a discussion on the woman’s rights question, but being a wary little body, and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the members into two hostile camps, she deferred this project indefinitely.  It would be time enough after she had her team well in hand, she said to herself,—­had felt their mouths and tried their paces.  This expression, as she used it in her thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and an ample vocabulary.  She could not do much with her own muscles, but she had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and thought of herself in the Secretary’s chair as not unlike the driver on his box.  A few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store itself up, and the same powers which had distanced competition in the classes of her school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous action in her new office.