And women, more obviously than men, perhaps, have "speeded up" in response to the democratic stimulus; their accomplishment along social, political, industrial, and above all, educational lines, since the first woman's college was founded, is not inconsiderable.

How much, or how little, would have been accomplished, industrially, socially, and politically, without that first woman's college, we shall never know, but the alumnae registers, with their statistics concerning the occupations of graduates, are suggestive reading. How little would have been accomplished educationally for women, it is not so difficult to imagine: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr,—with all the bright visions, the fullness of life that they connote to American women, middle-aged and young,—blotted out; coeducational institutions harassed by numbers and inventing drastic legislation to keep out the women; man still the almoner of education, and woman his dependent. From all these hampering probabilities the women's colleges save us to-day. This is what constitutes their negative value to education.

Their positive contribution cannot be summarized so briefly; its scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees' meetings, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the lips of the pioneers,—teacher and student. For, in the words of the graduate thesis, "we are still in the period of the sources." The would-be historian of a woman's college to-day is in much the same relation to her material as the Venerable Bede was to his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History. The thought brings us its own inspiration. If we sift our miracles with as much discrimination as he sifted his, we shall be doing well. We shall discover, among other things, that in addition to the composite influence which these colleges all together exert, each one also brings to bear upon our educational problems her individual experience and ideals. Wellesley, for example, with her women-presidents, and the heads of her departments all women but three,—the professors of Music, Education, and French,—has her peculiar testimony to offer concerning the administrative and executive powers of women as educators, their capacity for initiative and organization.

This is why a general history of the movement for the higher education of women, although of value, cannot tell us all we need to know, since of necessity it approaches the subject from the outside. The women's colleges must speak as individuals; each one must tell her own story, and tell it soon. The bright, experimental days are definitely past—except in the sense in which all education, alike for men and women, is perennially an experiment—and if the romance of those days is to quicken the imaginations of college girls one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence, the women who were the experiment and who lived the romance must write it down.

For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at the threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant. Inevitably those forty years before the fire of 1914 will go down in her history as a period apart. Already for her freshmen the old college hall is a mythical labyrinth of memory and custom to which they have no clue. New happiness will come to the hill above the lake, new beauty will crown it, new memories will hallow it, but—they will all be new. And if the coming generations of students are to realize that the new Wellesley is what she is because her ideals, though purged as by fire, are still the old ideals; if they are to understand the continuity of Wellesley's tradition, we who have come through the fire must tell them the story.

II.

On Wednesday, November 25, 1914, the workmen who were digging among the fire-scarred ruins at the extreme northeast corner of old College Hall unearthed a buried treasure. To the ordinary treasure seeker it would have been a thing of little worth,—a rough bowlder of irregular shape and commonplace proportions,—but Wellesley eyes saw the symbol. It was the first stone laid in the foundations of Wellesley College. There was no ceremony when it was laid, and there were no guests. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fowle Durant came up the hill on a summer morning—Friday, August 18, 1871, was the day—and with the help of the workmen set the stone in place.

A month later, on the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, 1871, the corner stone was laid, by Mrs. Durant, at the northwest corner of the building, under the dining-room wing; it is significant that from the foundations up through the growth and expansion of all the years, women have had a hand in the making of Wellesley. In September, as in August, there were no guests invited, but at the laying of the corner stone there was a simple ceremony; each workman was given a Bible, by Mr. Durant, and a Bible was placed in the corner stone. On December 18, 1914, this stone was uncovered, and the Bible was found in a tin box in a hollow of the stone. As most of the members of the college had scattered for the Christmas vacation, only a little group of people gathered about the place where, forty-three years before, Mrs. Durant had laid the stone. Mrs. Durant was too ill to be present, but her cousin, Miss Fannie Massie, lifted the tin box out of its hollow and handed it to President Pendleton who opened the Bible and read aloud the inscription:

"This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything in this institution; that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ."

There followed, also in Mrs. Durant's handwriting, two passages from the Scriptures: II Chronicles, 29: 11-16, and the phrase from the one hundred twenty-seventh Psalm: "Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it."

This stone is now the corner stone of the new building which rises on College Hill, and another, the keystone of the arch above the north door of old College Hall, will be set above the doorway of the new administration building, where its deep-graven I.H.S. will daily remind those who pass beneath it of Wellesley's unbroken tradition of Christian scholarship and service.

But we must go back to the days before one stone was laid upon another, if we are to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story. It was in 1855, the year after his marriage, that Mr. Durant bought land in Wellesley village, then a part of Needham, and planned to make the place his summer home. Every one who knew him speaks of his passion for beauty, and he gave that passion free play when he chose, all unwittingly, the future site for his college. There is no fairer region around Boston than this wooded, hilly country near Natick—"the place of hills"—with its little lakes, its tranquil, winding river, its hallowed memories of John Eliot and his Christian Indian chieftains, Waban and Pegan, its treasured literary associations with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Chief Waban gave his name, "Wind" or "Breath", to the college lake; on Pegan Hill, from which so many Wellesley girls have looked out over the blue distances of Massachusetts, Chief Pegan's efficient and time-saving squaw used to knit his stockings without heels, because "He handsome foot, and he shapes it hisself"; and Natick is the Old Town of Mrs. Stowe's "Old Town Folks."

In those first years after they began to spend their summers at Wellesley, the family lived in a brown house near what is now the college greenhouse, but Mr. Durant meant to build his new house on the hill above the lake, or on the site of Stone Hall, and to found a great estate for his little son. From time