CHAPTER IV

THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY

I.

The safest general statement which can be made about Wellesley students of the first forty years of the college is that more than sixty per cent of them have come from outside New England, from the Middle West, the Far West, and the South. Possibly there is a Wellesley type. Whether or not it could be differentiated from the Smith, the Bryn Mawr, the Vassar, and the Mt. Holyoke types, if the five were set up in a row, unlabeled, is a question. Yet it is true that certain recognizable qualities have developed and tend to persist among the students of Wellesley.

Wellesley girls are in the best sense democratic. There is no Gold Coast on the campus or in the village; money carries no social prestige. More money is spent, and more frivolously, than in the early days; there are more girls, and more rich girls, to spend it; yet the indifference to it except as a mechanical convenience, a medium of exchange and an opportunity for service, continues to be naively Utopian.

But money is not the only touchstone of democratic sensitiveness. At Wellesley there has always been uneasiness at the hint of unequal opportunity. When the college grew so large that membership in the six societies took on the aspect of special privilege, restiveness was as marked among the privileged as among the unprivileged, and more outspoken. The first result was the Barn Swallows, a social and dramatic society to which every student in college might belong if she wished. The second was the reorganization of the six societies on a more democratic and intellectual basis, to prevent "rushing", favoritism, cliques, and all the ills that mutually exclusive clubs are heir to. The agitation for these reforms came from the societies themselves, and they endured with Spartan determination the months of transitional misery and readjustment which their generous idealism brought upon their heads.

Enthusiasm for equality also enters into the students' attitude toward

"the academic", and like most enthusiasts, from the French Revolution down, they are capable of confusing the issue. In the early days, they were not allowed to know their marks, lest the knowledge should rouse an unworthy spirit of competition; and of all the rules instituted by the founder, this is the one which they have been most unwilling to see abolished. Silent Time they relinquished with relief; Domestic Work they abandoned without a pang; Bible Study shrank from four to three years and from three to two, and then to one, almost without their noticing it. But when, in 1901, the Honor Scholarships were established, a storm of protest burst among the undergraduates, and thundered and lightened for several weeks in the pages of College News. And not the least vehement of these protestants were the "Honor girls" themselves. To see their names posted in an alphabetical list of twenty or more students who had achieved, all unwittingly, a certain number of A's and B's throughout their course, seems to have caused them a mortification more keen than that experienced by St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar. But that the college ideal should be "degraded" pained them most.

There was something very touching and encouraging about this wrong-headed, right-hearted outburst. After the usual Wellesley fashion, freedom of speech prevailed; everybody spoke her mind. In the end "sweetness and light" dispersed the mists of sentiment which had assumed that to acknowledge inequality of achievement was to abolish equality of opportunity, and burned away the ethical haziness which had magnified mediocrity; the crusaders realized that the pseudo-compassion which would conceal the idle and the stupid, the industrious and the brilliant, in a common obscurity, is impracticable, since the fool and the genius cannot long be hid, and unfair, since the ant and the grasshopper would enjoy a like reward, and no democracy has yet claimed that those who do not work shall eat. When in 1912 the faculty at last decided to inform the students as to all their marks, the news was received with no protest and with an intelligent appreciation of the intellectual and ethical value of the new privilege.

The college was founded "for the glory of God and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women"; and

Wellesley girls are, in the best sense, religious. There has been no time in the first forty years when the undergraduates were not earnestly and genuinely preoccupied with religious questions and religious living. One recognizes this not only by the obvious and commonplace signs, such as the interest in the Christian Association, the Student Volunteer Movement, the Missionary Field, Silver Bay, manifested by the conventional Christian students; it is evident also in the hunger and thirst of the sincere rebels, in such signs as the "Heretics' Bible Class" a volunteer group which existed for a year or two in the second decade of the century, and which has had its prototypes at intervals throughout the forty years. One sees it in the interest and enthusiasm of the students who follow Professor Case's course in the Philosophy of Hegel; in the reverence and love with which girls of all creeds and of none speak of the Chapel services, and attend them. When two thirds of the girls go voluntarily and as a matter of course to an Ash Wednesday evening service, when Jew and Roman Catholic alike testify eagerly to the value of the morning Chapel service in their spiritual development, it is evident that the religious life is genuine and healthy. And it finds its outlet in the passion for social service which, if statistics can be trusted, inspires so many of the alumnae. The old-fashioned Puritan, if she still exists, may tremble for the souls of the Wellesley girls who crowd by hundreds into the "matinee train" on Saturday afternoon, but let us hope that she would be reassured to find the voluntary Bible and Mission Study classes attended, and even conducted, by many of these same girls. She might grieve over the years of Bible Study lost to the curriculum, and over the introduction of modern methods of Biblical Higher Criticism into the classroom; but surely she would be comforted to see how the students have arisen to the rescue of the devotional study of the Scriptures, with their voluntary classes enthusiastically maintained. It might even touch her sense of humor.

As the college has grown larger, undoubtedly more and more girls have come to Wellesley for other than intellectual reasons,--because it is "the thing" to go to college, or for "the life." But it is reassuring to find that the reactions of "the life" upon them always quicken them to a deeper respect for intellectual values. The "academic" holds first place in the

Wellesley life, not perfunctorily but vitally. The students themselves are swift to recognize and rebuke, usually in the "Free Press" or the "Parliament of Fools", of the College News, any signs of intellectual indifference or laxity. Wellesley, like Harvard and other large colleges, has its uninspiring level stretches of mediocrity; but it has its little leaping hills, its soaring peaks as well. Every class has its band of devoted students for whom the things of the mind are supreme; every class has its scattering of youthful scholars to give distinction to the academic landscape.

It would be absurd and useless to deny that Wellesley girls have their defects; they are of the sort that press for recognition; defects of manner, and manners, which are not confined to the students of any one college, or even to college students, but are due in a measure to the general change in our attitude towards women, and to the new freedom in which they all alike share. It is true that, to a degree, the graces and reserves which give charm and finish to daily living are sacrificed to the more pushing claims of study and athletics, in college. It is true that the unmodulated voice, the mushy enunciation, the unrestrained attitude, the slouchy clothes, too often go unrebuked in classroom and dormitory, where it seems to be nobody's business to rebuke them; but it is also usually true that, before they ever came to college, that voice, that attitude, those clothes, went unrebuked and even unheeded, at home or in the girls' camp, where it emphatically was somebody's business to heed and rebuke.

But it is the public which sees the worst of it, especially on trains, where groups of young voices or extreme fashions in dress become quite unintentionally conspicuous. Experienced from within, the life, despite its many little roughnesses, its small lapses in taste, is gracious and gentle, selfless in unobtrusive ways, and genuinely kind.

Religious, democratic, intellectually serious is our Wellesley girl, and last but not least, she is a lover of beauty. How could she fail to be? How many times, in early winter twilights, has she come over the stile into the Stone Hall meadow, and stood long moments, hushed, bespelled, by the tranquil pale loveliness of the lake, the dusky, rimming hills, the bare, slim blackness of twig and bough embroidering the silver sky,--the whole

luminous etching? How often, mid-morning in spring, has she sat with her book in a green shade west of the library, and lifted her eyes to see above the daffodil-bank of Longfellow's fountain the blue lake waters laughing between the upspringing trunks of the tall oak trees? Wherever there are Wellesley women, when spring is waking,--in Switzerland, in Sicily, in Japan, in England,--they are remembering the Wellesley spring, that pageant of young green of lawns and hills and tenderest flushing rose in baby oak leaves and baby maples, that twinkling dance of birches and of poplars, that splendor of the youth of the year amid which young maidens shone and blossomed, starring the campus among the other spring flowers. And are there Wellesley women anywhere in the autumn who do not think of Wellesley and four autumns? Of the long russet vistas of the west woods? Of the army with banners, scarlet and golden, and bronze and russet and rose, that marched and trumpeted around Lake Waban's streaming Persian pattern of shadows? When you speak to a Wellesley girl of her Alma Mater, her eyes widen with the lover's look, and you know that she is seeing a vision of pure beauty.

II.

In 1876, the students, shocked and grieved by the discovery of one of those cases of cheating with which every college has to deal from time to time, met together, and made a very stringent rule to be enforced by themselves. This "law", enacted on February 18, 1876, marks the first step toward Student Government at Wellesley; it reads as follows:

"The students of Wellesley College unanimously decree as a perpetual law of the college that no student shall use a translation or key in the study of any lesson or in any review, recitation, or examination. Every student who may enter the college shall be in honor bound to expose every violation of this law. If any student shall be known to violate this law, she shall be warned by a committee of the students and publicly exposed. If the offense be repeated the students shall demand her immediate expulsion as unworthy to remain a member of Wellesley College." It is signed by the presidents of the two classes, 1879 and 1880, then in college.

Until 1881, when the Courant, the first Wellesley periodical, gave the

students opportunity to express their minds concerning matters of college policy, we have no definite record of further steps toward self-government on the part of the undergraduates. The disciplinary methods of those early years are amusingly described by Mary C. Wiggin, of the class of '85, who tells us that authority was vested in four bodies, the president, the doctor, the corridor teacher and the head of the Domestic Department.

"The president was responsible for our going out and our coming in. The 'office' might give permission to leave town, but all tardiness in returning must be explained to the president. How timidly four of us came to Miss Freeman in my sophomore year to explain that the freshman's mother had kept us to supper after our 'permitted' drive on Monday afternoon! What an occasion it gave her to caution us as to sophomore influence over freshmen!

"Very infrequent were our journeys to Boston in those days, theaters were forbidden. Once during my four years I saw Booth in 'Macbeth' during a Christmas vacation, salving my conscience with a liberal interpretation of the phrase, 'while connected with the college', trying to forget the parting injunction, 'Remember, girls, that You are Wellesley College.'...

"In the old days we were seated alphabetically in church and chapel, where attendance was kept in each 'section' by one of its members. A growing laxity permitted you to sit out of place on Sunday evenings, provided that you reported to your section girl. Otherwise you would be called to the office to explain your absence....

"Very slowly did the idea dawn upon me that there was a faculty back of all these very pleasant personal relations."

But in the late '80's, the advance toward student self-government begins to be traceable, slowly but surely. In the spring of 1887, on the initiative of the faculty, the first formal conference between representatives of faculty and students was called, to consider questions of class organization. Other conferences took place at irregular intervals during the next seven years, as occasion arose, and these often led to new legislation. The subjects discussed were, the Magazine, the Legenda, Athletics, the Junior Prom. In the autumn of 1888, students were first

allowed to hand in excuses for absence from college classes; the responsibility for giving a "true, valid and signed excuse" resting with the individual student. In this same autumn the law forbidding eating between meals was repealed, but students were still not permitted to keep eatables in their rooms.

Articles on college courtesy, quiet in the library, articles for and against Domestic Work, begin to appear in the Courant and the Prelude in 1888 and 1889. In May, 1890, we learn of a Students' Association, which was the means of obtaining class bulletin boards in the autumn of 1890. From this time also, agitation on all topics of interest to the students is more openly active. In September, 1891, the faculty consent to allow library books to be taken out of the library on Saturday afternoon for use over Sunday. In October, 1891, we find that the Students' Association is to offer a medium for discussion and to foster a scholarly spirit. In December, 1891, a plea appears in the Prelude for occasional conferences between faculty and students on problems of college policy. In 1892, we read that the individual students are allowed to choose a church in the village and attend it on Sundays, if they so desire, instead of attending the College Chapel. In 1892 also, we have the agitation, in the Wellesley Magazine, for the wearing of cap and gown, and in this year senior privileges are extended, and the responsibility for absence from class appointments rests with the student. In November, 1892, the Magazine prints an article on Student Government by Professor Case of the Department of Philosophy. And the cap and gown census and discussion go gayly on. Early in 1893, there is a discussion of Student Government. In the spring of this year, there is an agitation for voluntary chapel. In September, the seniors begin to wear the cap and gown throughout the year. The year 1894 sees Silent Time abolished; and agitation,--always courteous and friendly,--goes on for Student Government, for the opening of the library on Sunday, for the abolition of Domestic Work. In 1893 or 1894, Professor Burrell, as head of College Hall, introduces the custom of having students sign for overtime when they wish to study after ten o'clock at night. In 1894, excuses for absence from chapel and classes are no longer required. In the spring of 1894, at the request of undergraduates, a conference with the faculty, in a

series of meetings, considers matters of interest in student life. Beginning with May, 1895, the library is opened on Sundays.

It is significant to note, in looking over these old files of college magazines, that when the students' interest waned, the faculty were always ready to administer the necessary prod. Not all the articles in favor of Student Government are written by students. President Shafer herself gave the strongest early impetus to the movement, although not through the press. In 1899, Professor Woolley, as head of College Hall, instituted a House Organization, which as an experiment in Student Government among the students then living in College Hall was a complete success. In June, 1900, we find arrangements made for a Faculty-Student Conference, to be held during the autumn months; and this body met five times. Its establishment did a great deal in paving the way to mutual understanding and trust when the definite question of Student Government was approached.

On March 6, 1901, at a mass meeting of the students, and after a spirited discussion, it was voted that the Academic Council be petitioned to give self-government to the students in all matters not academic. This date is kept every year as the birthday of Student Government. At another mass meeting, on April 9, Miss Katharine Lord, the President of the Student Association of Bryn Mawr, spoke to the college on Student Government, and on April 23, there was still another mass meeting. The student committee appointed to confer with the committee from the faculty had for its chairman Mary Leavens, of the class of 1901, student head of College Hall; Miss Pendleton, at that time secretary of the college, was the chairman of the faculty committee. Student Government found in her, from the beginning, a convinced and able champion. In April, the constitution was submitted to the committee of the faculty, and in May the constitution and the agreement, after careful consideration, were submitted to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees. On May 29, an all day election for president was held, resulting in the choice of Frances L. Hughes, 1902, as first president of the Student Government Association of Wellesley College. On June 6, the report was adopted and the agreement was signed by the president and secretary of the Board of Trustees and the

president of the college. On June 7, in the presence of the faculty and the whole student body, in chapel, the agreement was read and signed on behalf of the faculty by the secretary of the college. The ceremony was impressive and memorable in its simplicity and solemnity. After Miss Pendleton had signed her name, the students rose and remained standing while the agreement was signed by Frances L. Hughes, President of the Association for 1901 and 1902, May Mathews, President of the Class of 1902, Margaret C. Mills, President of the Class of 1901, and Mary Leavens, President of the House Council of College Hall. The Scripture lesson was taken from I. Corinthians, "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid," and the recessional was, "How firm a foundation."

The Association is organized with a president and vice president, chosen from the senior class, and a secretary and a treasurer from the juniors; these are all elected by the whole undergraduate body. There is an Executive Board whose members are the president, vice president, secretary and treasurer of the association, the house presidents and their proctors, and a representative from each of the four classes, elected by the class. The government is in all essentials democratic. The rules are made and executed by the whole body of students; but all legislation of the students is subject to approval by the college authorities, and if any question arises as to whether or not a subject is within the jurisdiction of the association, it is referred to a joint committee of seven, made up of a standing committee of three appointed by the faculty, a standing committee of three appointed by the association, and the president of the college.

In intrusting to the association the management of all matters not strictly academic concerning the conduct of students in their college life, the College authorities reserve the right to regulate all athletic events and formal entertainments, all societies, clubs and other organizations, all Society houses, and all publications, all matters pertaining to public health and safety and to household management and the use of college property. The students are responsible for all matters of registration and absence from college, for the regulation of travel, permission for Sunday callers, rules governing chaperonage, the maintenance of quiet, the general

conduct of students on the campus and in the village. It is they who have abolished the "ten-o'clock-bedtime rule"; it is they who have decreed that students shall not go to Boston on Sundays, but this rule is relaxed for seniors, who are allowed two Boston Sundays, in which they may attend church or an afternoon sacred concert in the city. If a student wishes to spend Sunday away from college, she must go away on Saturday and remain until Monday.

Questions of minor discipline, such as the enforcing of the rule of quiet in the dormitories, are handled by the students; not yet, it must be confessed, with complete success, as the quiet in the dormitories-- especially the freshman houses--falls short of that holy calm which studious girls have a right to claim. Serious misdemeanors are of course in the jurisdiction of the president of the college and the faculty. One very important college duty, the proctoring of examinations, which would seem to be an entirely legitimate function of the Student Government Association, the students themselves have not as yet been willing to assume. During the years when the freshmen, sometimes as many as four hundred, were housed in the village because of the crowded conditions on the campus, the burden upon the Student Government Association, and especially upon the vice president and her senior assistants who had charge of the village work, was, in the opinion of many alumnae and some members of the faculty, heavier than they should have been expected to shoulder; for, when all is said, students do come to college primarily to pursue the intellectual life, rather than to be the monitors of undergraduate behavior. Fortunately, with the endowment of the college and the building of new dormitories on the campus, the village problem will be eliminated. The students themselves are unanimously enthusiastic concerning Student Government, and the history of the association since its establishment reveals an earnest and increasingly intelligent acceptance of responsibility on the part of the student body. From the beginning the ultimate success of the movement has been almost unquestioned, and the association is now as stable an institution, apparently, as the Academic Council or the Board of Trustees.

III.

The most important of the associations which bring Wellesley students into touch with the outside world are the Christian Association and the College Settlements Association. These two, with the Consumers' League and the Equal Suffrage League--also flourishing organizations--help to foster the spirit of service which has characterized the college from its earliest days.

The Christian Association did not come into existence until 1884, but in the very first year of the college a Missionary Society was formed, which gave "Missionary concerts" on Sunday evenings in the chapel, and adopted as its college missionary, Gertrude Chandler (Wyckoff) of the class of 1879, who went out to the mission field in India in 1880. In the first decade also a Temperance Society was formed, and noted speakers on temperance visited the college. But in 1883, in order to unify the religious work, a Christian Association was proposed. The initiative seems to have come from the faculty, and this was natural, as the little group of teachers from the University of Michigan--President Freeman, Professor Chapin of the Department of Greek, Professor Coman of Economics, Professor Case of Philosophy, Professor Chandler of Mathematics,-- had had a hand in developing the Young Women's Christian Association at Ann Arbor.

The first meeting of this Association was held in College Hall Chapel, October 8, 1884, and we read that it was formed "for the purpose of promoting Christian fellowship as a means of individual growth in character, and of securing, by the union of the various societies already existing, a more systematic arrangement of the work to be done in college by officers and students, for the cause of Christ."

Those who joined the association pledged themselves to declare their belief in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and to dedicate their lives to His service. They promised to abide by the laws of the association and seek its prosperity; ever to strive to live a life consistent with its character as a Christian Association, and, as far as in them lay, to engage in its activities; to cultivate a Christian fellowship with its members, and as opportunity offered, to endeavor to lead others to a Christian life.

Wellesley is rightly proud of the Christian simplicity and inclusiveness of this pledge.

The work of the association included Bible study, devotional meetings, individual work, and the development of missionary interest. Three hundred and seventy signed as charter members, and Professor Stratton of the Department of Rhetoric was the first president. The students held most of the offices, but it was not until 1894 that a student president,--Cornelia Huntington of the class of 1895--was elected. Since then, this office has always been held by a student. From its inception the association received the greatest help and inspiration from Mrs. Durant, for many years the President of the Boston Young Women's Christian Association, which was one of the first of its kind.

Early in its career, the Wellesley Association adopted, besides its foreign missionary, a home missionary, and later a city missionary who worked in New York. An Indian committee was formed, and Thanksgiving entertainments were given at the Woman's Reformatory in Sherborn and the Dedham Asylum for released prisoners. In this prison work, the college always had the fullest help and sympathy of Mrs. Durant. The Wellesley Student Volunteer Band was organized May 26, 1890, and in 1915 there were known to be about one hundred Wellesley girls in the foreign field, and there were probably others of whom the college was uninformed. It is a noble and inspiring record.

In 1905, after the union of many of the Young Women's Christian Associations and the formation of the National Board, Wellesley was urged to affiliate herself with the National Association, but she was unwilling to narrow her own pledge, to meet the conditions of the National Board. She felt that she better served the cause of Christian Unity by admitting to her fellowship a wider range of Christians, so-called, than the National Board was at that time prepared to tolerate; and she was also more or less fearful of too much dictation. It was not until 1913, at the Fourth Biennial Convention of the Young Women's Christian Associations, held at Richmond, Virginia, that Wellesley was received into the National organization; and she came retaining her own pledge and her own constitution.

In the old days, the Christian Association was the stronghold of the dying Evangelicalism, and was looked on with distaste by many of the radical students; but of late years, its tone and its method have changed to meet the needs of the modern girl, and it has become a power throughout the college. The annual report for 1913-1914 shows a total membership of 1297. The association carries on Mission Study Classes; Bible Classes which the students teach, under the direction of volunteers from the faculty, in such subjects as "The Social Teachings of Jesus", "The Ideals of Israel's Leaders as Forces in Our Lives", "Christ in Everyday Life"; "General Aid" work, for girls who need to earn money in college. Its Social Committee is active among freshmen and new students. Of its special committees, the one on Conferences and Conventions plays an important part in quickening the interest in Silver Bay, and the one on "the College in Spain" presents the needs and claims of the International Institute for Girls at Madrid. Besides its regular meetings, the Christian Association now has charge of the Lenten services, and this effort to deepen the devotional life of the college has met with a swift response from the students. During 1913-1914, in Lent, the chapel was open every afternoon for meditation and prayer, and cards with selected prayers for each day were furnished to all who cared to use them. Unquestionably, Wellesley possesses no student organization more living and more life- giving than its Christian Association.

Four years after the foundation of the Christian Association, Wellesley had opened her heart and her mind to the College Settlement idea. The movement, as is well known, originated in the late '80's in America. At the same time that Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were starting Hull House in Chicago, a group of Smith College alumnae, chief among whom were Vida D. Scudder, Clara French, Helen Rand (Thayer), and Jean Fine (Spahr), was pressing for the establishment of a house in the East. And the idea was understood and fostered by Wellesley about as soon as by Smith, for it was interpreted at Wellesley by Professor Scudder, who became a member of the college faculty, as instructor in English Literature, in the autumn of 1887. In 1889, the Courant printed an article on College Settlements, and students of the later '80's and early '90's will never forget

the ardor and excitement of those days when Wellesley was bearing her part in starting what was to be one of the important movements for social service in the nineteenth century. All her early traditions and activities made the college swift to understand and welcome this new idea.

From the beginning, the social impulse has been inherent in Wellesley, and settlement work was native to her. Professor Whiting tells us that there used to be a shoe factory in Wellesley Village, about where the Eliot now stands; that the students became interested in the girl operatives, most of whom lived in South Natick, and that they started a factory girls' club which met every Saturday evening for years, and was led by college girls. In Charles River Village, also at that time a factory town, Mr. Durant held evangelistic services during one winter, and "teacher specials" used to help him, and to teach in the Sunday School.

In 1890-1891, probably because of the settlement impulse, work among the maids in the college was set going by the Christian Association. A maids' parlor was furnished under the old gymnasium, and classes for the maids were started.

In 1891, the Wellesley Chapter of the College Settlements Association was organized. It was Professor Katharine Lee Bates (Wellesley '80) who first suggested the plan for an intercollegiate organization, with chapters in the different colleges for women; and her friend Adaline Emerson (Thompson), a Wellesley graduate of the class of '80, was the first president of the association. Wellesley women have ever since taken a prominent part in the direction of the association's policy and in the active life of the settlement houses in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Wellesley has given presidents, secretaries, and many electors to the association itself, and head-workers and a continuous stream of efficient and devoted residents, not only to the four College Settlements, but to Social Settlement houses all over the country. The College Chapter keeps a special interest in the work of the Boston Settlement, Denison House; students give entertainments occasionally for the settlement neighbors, and help in many ways at Christmas time; but practical social service from undergraduates is not the ideal nor the desire of the College Settlements Association. It aims rather at the quickening of sympathy and

intelligence on social questions, and the moral and financial support which the College Chapter can give its representatives out in the world. Such by- products of the settlement interest as the Social Study Circle, an informal group of undergraduates and teachers which met for several years to study social questions, are worth much more to the movement than the immature efforts of undergraduates in directing settlement clubs and classes.

Already the historic perspective is sufficiently clear for us to realize that the College Settlement Movement is the unique, and perhaps the most important organized contribution of the women's colleges to civilization during their first half century of existence. Through this movement, in which they have played so large a part, they have exerted an influence upon social thought and conscience exceeded, in this period, by few other agencies, religious, philanthropic or industrial, if we except the Trade- union Movement and Socialism, which emanate from the workers themselves. The prominent part which Wellesley has played in it will doubtless be increasingly understood and valued by her graduates.

IV.

Let it be frankly acknowledged: the ordinary adult is usually bored by the undergraduate periodical--even though he may, once upon a time, have edited it himself. The shades of the prison-house make a poor light for the Gothic print of adolescence. But the historian, if we may trust allegory, bears a torch. For him no chronicle, whether compiled by twelfth-century monk or twentieth-century collegian, can be too remote, too dull, to reflect the gleam. And some chronicles, like the Wellesley one, are more rewarding than others.

No one can turn over the pages of these fledgling journals, Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, without being impressed by the unconscious clarity with which they reflect not merely the events in the college community--although they are unusually faithful and accurate recorders of events--but the college temper of mind, the range of ideas, the reaction to interests beyond the campus, the general trend of the intellectual and spiritual life.

The interest in social questions is to the fore astonishingly early. In

Wellesley's first newspaper, the Courant, published in the college year 1888-1889, we find articles on the Working Girls of Boston, on the Single Tax, and notes of a prize essay on Child Labor. And throughout the decade of the '90's, the dominant note in the Prelude, 1889-1892, and its successor, the Wellesley Magazine, 1892-1911, is the social note. Reports of college events give prominent place to lectures on Woman Suffrage, Social Settlements, Christian Socialism. In 1893, William Clarke of the London Chronicle, a member of the Fabian Society, visiting America as a delegate to the Labor Congress in Chicago, gave lectures at Wellesley on "The Development of Socialism in England", "The Government of London", "The London Working Classes." Matthew Arnold's visit came too early to be recorded in the college paper, but he was perhaps the first of a notable list of distinguished Englishmen who have helped to quicken the interest of Wellesley students along social lines. Graham Wallas, Lowes-Dickinson,

H. G. Wells, are a few of the names found in the pages of the Magazine and the News. The young editors evidently welcomed papers on social themes, such as "The Transition in the Industrial Status of Women, by Professor Coman"; and the great strikes of the decade, The Homestead Strike, the Pennsylvania Coal Strike, the New Bedford Strike, are written up as a matter of course. It is interesting to note that the paper on the Homestead Strike, with a plea for the unions, was written by an undergraduate, Mary K. Conyngton, who has since won for herself a reputation for research work in the Labor Bureau at Washington.

Political articles are only less prominent than social and industrial material. As early as 1893 we have an article on "The Triple Alliance" and in the Magazine of 1898 and 1899 there are papers on "The Colonial Expansion of the Great European Powers", "The Italian Riots of May, 1898", "The Philippine Question", "The Dreyfus Incident." This preoccupation of young college women of the nineteenth century with modern industrial and political history is significant when we consider the part that woman has elected to play in politics and reform since the beginning of the twentieth century.

In the first years of that new century, the Magazine and the weekly News begin to reflect the general revival of religious interest among

young people. The Student Volunteer Movement, the increased activities in the Christian Associations for both men and women, find their response in Wellesley students. Letters from missionaries are given prominence; the conferences at Silver Bay are written up enthusiastically and at great length. Social questions never lapse, at Wellesley, but during the decade 1900 to 1910, the dominant journalistic note is increasingly religious. Later, with the activity of the Social Study Circle, an informal club for the study of social questions, and its offspring the small but earnest club for the study of Socialism, the social interests regained their vitality for the student mind.

Besides the extra mural problems, the periodicals record, of course, the events and the interests of the little college world. Through the "Free Press" columns of these papers, the didactic, critical, and combative impulses, always so strong in the undergraduate temperament, find a safe vent. Mentor and agitator alike are welcomed in the "Free Press", and many college reforms have been inaugurated, and many college grievances--real and imagined--have been aired in these outspoken columns. And not the least readable portions of the weeklies have been the "Waban Ripples" in the Prelude, and the "Parliament of Fools" in the News. For Wellesley has a merry wit and is especially good at laughing at herself,-- yes, even at that "Academic" of which she is so loyally proud. Witness these naughty parodies of examination questions, which appeared in a "Parliament of Fools" just before the mid-year examinations of 1915.

Philosophy: "Translate the following into Kant, Spencer, Perry, Leibnitz, Hume, Calkins (not more than one page each allowed).

"'Little drops of water, little grains of sand, Make the mighty ocean, and a pleasant land.'

"The remainder of the time may be employed in translating into Kantian terminology, the title of the book: 'Myself and I.'"

English Literature: "Give dates and significance of the following; and state whether they are persons or books: Stratford-on-Avon, Magna Charta, Louvain, Onamataposa, Synod of Whitby, Bunker Hill, Transcendentalism, Mesopotamia, Albania, Hastings.

"Write an imaginary conversation between John Bunyan and Myrtle

Reed on the Social significance of Beowulf.

"Do you consider that Browning and Carlyle were influenced by the Cubist School? Cite passages not discussed in class to support your view.

"Trace the effects of the Norman strain in England in the works of Tolstoi, Cervantes, and Tagore."

English Composition: "Write a novelette containing: (a) Plot; (b) two crises; (c) three climaxes; (d) one character.

"Write a biography of your own life, bringing out distinctly reasons pro and con. Outline form."

Biblical History: "Trace the life of Abraham from Genesis through Malachi.

"Quote the authentic passages of the New Testament. Why or why

not?

"Where do the following words recur? Verily, greeting, begat,

therefore, Pharisee, holy, notacceptedbythescholars."

Excellent fooling, this; and it should go far to convince a skeptical public that college girls take their educational advantages with sanity.

As literary magazines, these Wellesley periodicals are only sporadically successful. Now and again a true poet flashes through their pages; less often a true story-teller, although the mechanical excellence of most of the stories is unquestionable,--they go through the motions quite as if they were the real thing. But the appeals of the editors for poetry and literary prose; their occasional sardonic comments upon the apathy of the college reading public,--especially during the waning later years of the Magazine, before it was absorbed into the monthly issue of the News,-- would seem to indicate that the pure, literary imagination is as rare at Wellesley as it is in the world at large. Yet there are shining pages in these chronicles, pages whose golden promise has been fulfilled. In 1911, the Alumnae Association discussed the advisability of publishing an alumnae magazine, but it was decided that the time was not yet ripe for the new enterprise, and instead an agreement was entered into with the News, by which a certain number of pages each month were to be at the disposal of the alumnae editor, for articles and essays on college matters which should be of interest to the alumnae. The new department has been marked from

the beginning by dignity and interest, and the papers contributed have been unusually valuable, especially from the point of view of college history.

In 1889 Wellesley's Senior Annual, the Legenda, came into being. In general it has followed the conventional lines of all college annuals, but occasionally it has departed from the beaten path, as in 1892, when it was transformed into a Wellesley Songbook; in 1894, when it printed a memorial sketch of Miss Shafer, and a biographical sketch of Mrs. Durant; in 1896, when it became a storybook of college life.

In October, 1912, The Wellesley College Press Board was organized by Mrs. Helene Buhlert Magee, of the class of 1903. The board is the outgrowth of an attempt by the college authorities, in 1911, to regulate the work of its budding journalists. Up to this time the newspapers had been supplied, more or less intermittently and often unsatisfactorily, with items of college news by students engaged by the newspapers and responsible only to them. The college now appoints an official reporter from its own faculty, who sends all Wellesley news to the newspapers and is consulted by the regular reporters when they desire special information. The Press Board, organized by this official reporter, consists of seven students reporting for Boston papers and two for those in New York. At the time of the Wellesley fire, this board proved itself particularly efficient in disseminating accurate information.

V.

But it is not the workaday Wellesley, tranquilly pursuing her serious and semi-serious occupations, that the outsiders know best. To them, she is wont to turn her holiday face. And no college plays with more zest than Wellesley. Perhaps because no college ever had such a perfect playground. Every hill and grove and hollow of the beautiful campus holds its memories of playdays and midsummer nights.

Those were the nights when Rosalind and Orlando wandered out of Arden into a New England moonlight; when flitting Ariel forsook Prospero's isle to make his nest in Wellesley's bowering rhododendrons -- in blossom time he is always hovering there, a winged bloom, for eyes that

are not holden. Those were the nights when Puck came dancing up from Tupelo with Titania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught, cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their passion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and argued of love with Aucassin. Those were the nights when the Countess Cathleen--loveliest of Yeats's Irish ladies--found Paradise and the Heavenly Host awaiting her on a Wellesley hilltop when she had sold her soul to feed her starving peasants.

But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs, Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn. To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens was ever so vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past Tree Days.

On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors and sophomores and freshmen,--more than fourteen hundred of them in 1914. Then it breaks ranks and plants itself in parterres at the foot of the hill, masses of blue, and rose, and lavender, and golden blossoming girls. Contrary Mistress Mary's garden was nothing to it. And after the procession come the dances. Sometimes a Breton Pardon wanders across the sea. The gods from Olympus are very much at home in these groves of academe. Once King Arthur's knight came riding up the wide avenue at the edge of the green. The spirits of sun and moon, the nymphs of the wind and the rain, have woven their mystical spells on that great greensward. And in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies.

The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities. And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful exotics, Japanese golden evergreens--one for 1879 and one for 1880. The two trees were planted on May 16, 1877, the sophomore tree by the library, the freshman tree by the dining room. An early chronicler writes, "Then it was that the venerated spade made its first appearance. We had confidently expected a trowel, had written indeed 'Apostrophe to the Trowel' on our programs, and our apostrophist (do not see the dictionary), a girl of about the same height as the spade, but by no means, as she modestly suggested, of the same mental capacity, was so stricken with astonishment when she had mounted the rostrum and this burly instrument was propped up before her, that she nearly forgot her speech.... And then it was there was introduced the more questionable practice of planting class trees too delicate to bear the college course. Although a foolish little bird built her nest and laid her eggs in the golden-leaved evergreen of '79, and although a much handsomer nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks."

The true story of the Wellesley spade and how it came to be handed down from class to class, is recorded in Florence Morse Kingsley's diary, where we learn how the "burly instrument" of 1877 was succeeded by a less unwieldy and more ladylike utensil. Under the date, April 3, 1878, we find:

Our class (the class of '81) had a meeting last night. We held it in one of the laboratories on the fifth floor, quite in secret, for we didn't want the '80 girls to find it out. The class of '80 is thought to be extraordinarily brilliant, and they certainly do look down on us freshmen in haughty disdain as being correspondingly stupid. I don't say very much against them, since I is an '80 girl: besides, if l work hard I can graduate with '80, but at present my lot is cast with '81. We have decided to have a tree planting, and it is to be entirely original and the first of a series. Mr. Durant has given a Japanese Golden Evergreen to '79 and one to '80. They

are precisely alike and they had been planted for quite a while before he thought of turning them into class trees. We heard a dark rumor yesterday to the effect that Mr. Durant is intending to plant another evergreen under the library window and present it to us. But we voted to forestall his generosity. We mean to have an elm, and we want to plant it out in front of the college, in the center or just on the other side of the driveway. The burning question remained as to who should acquaint Mr. Durant with our valuable ideas. Nobody seemed ravenously eager for the job, and finally l was nominated. "You know him better than we do," they all said, so l finally consented. I haven't a ghost of an idea what to say; for when one comes to think of it, it is rather ungrateful of '81 not to want the evergreen under the library window.

April 10. Alice and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into the subject alone. I began in medias res, for l couldn't think of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur of the moment. Mr. Durant was in the office with a pile of papers before him as usual; he appeared to be very preoccupied and he was looking rather severe. The interview proceeded about as follows:

He glanced up at us sharply and said, "Well, young ladies," which meant, "Kindly get down to business; my time is valuable." I got down to it about as gracefully as a cat coming down a tree, like this: "We have decided to have a regular tree-planting, Mr. Durant." Of course I should have said, "The class of '81 would like to have a tree-planting, if you please."

Mr. Durant appeared somewhat startled: "Eh, what's that?" he said, then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled--just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle.

"Alice and I are delegates from the Class of '81," I explained, a trifle more lucidly. "The class has voted to plant an elm for our class tree, and we would like to plant it in front of the college in a prominent spot." We

had previously decided gracefully to ignore the evergreen rumor.

Mr. Durant looked thoughtful. "Hum," he said, "I'd planned to give you girls of '81 a choice evergreen, and as for a place for it: what do you say to the plot on the north side, just under the library window?"

l looked beseechingly at Alice. She was apparently very much occupied in a meek survey of the toes of her boots, which she had stubbed into premature old age scrambling up and down from the boat landings.

Meanwhile Mr. Durant was waiting for our look of pleased surprise and joyful acquiescence. Then, without a vestige of diplomacy, l blurted right out, "Yes, Mr. Durant; we heard so; but we don't think, that is, we don't want an evergreen under the library window; we would like a tree that will live a long, long time and grow big like an elm, and we want it where everybody will see it."

Mr. Durant looked exceedingly surprised, and for the space of five seconds I was breathless. Then he smiled in the really fascinating way that he has. "Well," he said, and looked at me again, "what else have you decided to do?"

Then I told him all about the program we had planned, which is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the spade yet, and l told him "no," but Alice and l were going to buy it for the class in the village that afternoon.

"Well, mind you get a good one," he advised. We said we would, very joyfully. Then he told us we might select any young elm we wanted, and tie our class colors on it, and he would order it to be transplanted for us. After that he put on his hat and all three of us went out and fixed the spot right in front of the college by the driveway. Mr. Durant himself stuck a little stick in the exact place where the elm of '81 will wave its branches for at least a hundred years, I hope.

The hundred years are still to run, and old College Hall has vanished, but the '81 elm stands in its "prominent" place, a tree of ancient memories and visions ever young.

It was not until 1889 that the pageant element began to take a definite and conspicuous place in the Tree Day exercises. The class of '89 in its senior year gave a masque in which tall dryads, robed in green, played their dainty roles; and that same year the freshmen, the class of 1892, gave the first Tree Day dance: a very mild dance of pink and white English maidens around a maypole--but the germ of all the Tree Day dances yet unborn. In its senior year, 1892 celebrated the discovery of America by a sort of kermess of Colonial and Indian dances with tableaux, and ever since, from year to year, the wonder has grown; Zeus, and Venus, and King Arthur have all held court and revel on the Wellesley Campus. Every year the long procession across the green grows longer, more beautiful, more elaborate; the dancing is more exquisitely planned, more complex, more carefully rehearsed. In the spring, Wellesley girls are twirling a- tiptoe in every moment not spent in class; and in class their thoughts sometimes dance. Indeed, the students of late years have begun to ask themselves if it may not be possible to obtain quite as beautiful a result with less expense of effort and time and money; for Tree Day, the crowning delight of the year, would defeat its own end, which is pure recreation, if its beauty became a tyrant.

This multiplication of joys--and their attendant worries--is something that Wellesley has to take measures to guard against, and the faculty has worked out a scheme of biennial rotatory festivities which since 1911- 1912 has eased the pressure of revelry in May and June, as well as throughout the winter months.

Wellesley's list of societies and social clubs is not short, but the conditions of membership are carefully guarded. As early as the second year of the college, five societies came into existence: of these, the Beethoven Society and the Microscopical --which started with a membership of six and an exhibition under three microscopes at its first meeting--seem to have been open to any who cared to join; the other three--the Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma societies founded in November, 1876, and the Shakespeare in January, 1877--were mutually exclusive. The two Greek letter societies were literary in aim, and their early programs consisted in literary papers and oral debates. The Shakespeare Society, for

many years a branch of the London Shakespeare Society, devoted itself to the study and dramatic presentation of Shakespeare. Its first open-air play was "As You Like It", given in 1889; and until 1912, when it conformed to the new plan of biennial rotation, this society gave a Shakespearean play every year at Commencement.

In 1881, Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma were discontinued by the faculty, because of pressure of academic work, but in 1889 they were reorganized, and gradually their programs were extended to include dramatic work, poetic plays, and masques. The Phi Sigma Society gives its masque-- sometimes an original one--on alternate years just before the Christmas vacation; and Zeta Alpha alternates with the Classical Society at Commencement. The Zeta Alpha Masque of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend by Elizabeth McClellan of the class of 1913, was one of the notable events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the lovely old poem "Aucassin and Nicolette", was given for the second time.

In 1889, the Art Society--known since 1894 as Tau Zeta Epsilon-- was founded; and, alternating with the Shakespeare play, it gives in the spring a "Studio Reception", at which pictures from the old masters, with living models, are presented. The effects of lighting and color are so carefully studied, and the compositions of the originals are so closely followed that the illusion is sometimes startling; it is as if real Titians, Rembrandts, and Carpaccios hung on the wails of the Wellesley Barn. In 1889, also, the Glee and Banjo clubs were formed.

In 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into existence. The serious intellectual quality of its work does honor to the college, and its open debates, at which it has sometimes represented the House of Commons, sometimes one or the other of the American Chambers of Congress, are marked events in the college calendar.

In 1892, Alpha Kappa Chi, the Classical Society, was organized, and of late years its Greek play, presented during Commencement week, has surpassed both the senior play and the Shakespeare play in dramatic rendering and careful study of the lines. Gilbert Murray's translation of the

"Medea", presented in 1914, was a performance of which Wellesley was justly proud. Usually the Wellesley plays are better as pageants than as dramatic productions, but the Classical Society is setting a standard for the careful literary interpretation and rendering of dramatic texts, which should prove stimulating to all the societies and class organizations.

The senior play is one of the chief events of Commencement week, but the students have not always been fully awake to their dramatic opportunity. If college theatricals have any excuse for being, it is not found in attempts to compete with the commercial stage and imitate the professional actor, but rather in dramatic revivals such as the Harvard Delta Upsilon has so spiritedly presented, or in the interpretation of the poetic drama, whether early or late, which modern theaters with their mixed audiences cannot afford to present. The college audience is always a selected audience, and has a right to expect from the college players dramatic caviare. That Wellesley is moving in the right direction may be seen by reading a list of her senior plays, among which are the "Countess Cathleen", by Yeats, Alfred Noyes's "Sherwood", and in 1915 "The Piper" by Josephine Peabody Marks.

But Wellesley's recreation is not all rehearsed and formal. May Day, when the seniors roll their hoops in the morning, and all the college comes out to dance on the green and eat ice-cream cones in the afternoon, is full of spontaneous jollity. Before the burning of College Hall, the custom had arisen of cleaning house on May Day, and six o'clock in the morning saw the seniors out with pails and mops, scrubbing and decorating the many statues which kept watch in the beloved old corridors.

One of these statutes had become in some sort the genius of College Hall. Of heroic size, a noble representation of womanly force and tranquillity, Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau had watched the stream of American girlhood flow through "the Center" and surge around the palms for twenty-eight years. The statue was originally made at the request of Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, the well-known abolitionist and dear friend of Miss Martineau; but after Mrs. Chapman's death, it was Miss Whitney's to dispose of, and, representing as it did her ideal modern woman, she gave it in 1886 to Wellesley, where modern womanhood was

in the making. In later years, irreverent youth took playful liberties with "Harriet", using her much as a beloved spinster aunt is used by fond but familiar young nieces. No freshman was considered properly matriculated until she had been dragged between the rungs of Miss Martineau's great marble chair; May Day always saw "Aunt Harriet" rise like Diana fresh from her bath, to be decked with more or less becoming furbelows; and as the presiding genius in the lighter columns of College News, her humor-- an acquired characteristic-- was merrily appreciated. Of all the lost treasures of College Hall she is perhaps the most widely mourned.

The pretty little Society houses, dotted about the campus, also give the students opportunity to entertain their guests, both formally and informally, and during the months following the fire, when Wellesley was cramped for space, they exercised a generous hospitality which put all the college in their debt.

As the membership in the Shakespeare and Greek letter societies is limited to between forty and fifty members in each society, the great majority of the students are without these social privileges, but the Barn Swallows, founded in 1897, to which every member of the college may belong if she wishes, gives periodic entertainments in the "Barn" which go far to promote general good feeling and social fellowship. The first president of the Barn Swallows, Mary E. Haskell, '97, says that it arose as an Everybody's Club, to give buried talents a chance. "Suddenly we adjured the Trustees by Joy and Democracy to bless our charter, to be gay once a week, and when they gave the Olympic nod we begged for the Barn to be gay in--and they gave that too.

"It was a grim joy parlor; rough old floor, bristly with splinters, few windows, no plank walk, no stage, no partitions, no lighting. We hung tin reflectored lanterns on a few of the posts,--thicker near the stage end,--and opened the season with an impromptu opera of the Brontes'." To Professor Charlotte F. Roberts, Wellesley '80, the Barn Swallows owe their happy name.

Besides these more formal organizations there are a number of department clubs, the Deutsche Verein, the Alliance Francaise, the Philosophy Club, the Economics Club, and informal groups such as the

old Rhymesters' Club, which flourished in the late nineties, the Scribblers' which seems to have taken its place and enlarged its scope, the Social Study Circle, the little Socialist Club, and others through which the students express their intellectual and social interests.

Of Wellesley's many festivities and playtimes it would take too long to tell: of her Forensic Burnings, held when the last junior forensic for the year is due; of her processional serenades, with Chinese lanterns; of her singing on the chapel steps in the evenings of May and June. These well- beloved customs have been establishing themselves year by year more firmly in undergraduate hearts, but it is not always possible to trace them to their "first time." Most of them date back to the later years of the nineteenth century, or the first of the twentieth. Wellesley's musical cheer seems to have waked the campus echoes first in the spring of 1890, as a result of a prize offered in November, 1889, although as far back as 1880 there is mention of a cheer. The musical cheer has so much beauty and dignity, both near at hand and at a distance, that many of the early alumnae and the faculty wish it might some time quite supersede the ugly barking sounds, imitated from the men's colleges, with which the girls are fain to evince their approval and celebrate their triumphs. They invariably end their barking with the musical cheer, however, keeping the best for the last, and relieving the tortured graduate ear.

Formal athletics at Wellesley developed from the gymnasium practice, the rowing on the lake, and the Tree Day dancing. In the early years, the class crews used to row on the lake and sing at sunset, in their heavy, broad-bottomed old tubs; and from these casual summer evenings "Float" has been evolved--Wellesley's water pageant--when Lake Waban is dotted with gay craft, and the crews in their slim, modern, eight-oared shells, display their skill. This is the festival which the public knows best, for unlike Tree Day, to which outsiders have been admitted on only three occasions, "Float" has always been open to friendly guests. Year by year the festival grows more elaborate. Chinese junks, Indian canoes, Venetian gondolas, flower boats from fairyland, glide over the bright sunset waters, and the crews in their old traditional star pattern anchor together and sing their merry songs. There are new songs every spring, for each crew has its

own song, but there are two of the old songs which are heard at every Wellesley Float, "Alma Mater", and the song of the lake, that Louise Manning Hodgkins wrote for the class of '87.

Lake of gray at dawning day, In soft shadows lying,-- Waters kissed by morning mist, Early breezes sighing,-- Fairy vision as thou art, Soon thy fleeting charms depart. Every grace that wins the heart, Like our youth is flying.

Lake of blue, a merry crew, Cheer of thee will borrow. Happy hours to-day are ours, Weighted by no sorrow. Other years may bring us tears, Other days be full of fears, Only hope the craft now steers. Cares are for the morrow.

Lake of white at holy night, In the moonlight gleaming,-- Softly o'er the wooded shore, Silver radiance streaming,-- On thy wavelets bear away Every care we've known to-day, Bring on thy returning way Peaceful, happy dreaming.

After the singing, the Hunnewell cup is presented for the crew competition; and with the darkness, the fireworks begin to flash up from the opposite shore of the lake.

Besides the rowing clubs, in the first decade, there were tennis clubs, and occasional outdoor "meets" for cross-country runs, but apparently there was no regular organization combining in one association all the separate clubs until 1896-1897, when we hear of the formation of a "New Athletic Association." There is also record of a Field Day on May 29, 1899. In 1902, we find the "new athletics"--evidently a still newer variety than those of 1897--"recognized by the trustees"; and the first Field Day under this newest regime occurred on November 3, 1902. All the later Field Days have been held in the late autumn, at the end of the sports season, which now includes a preliminary season in the spring and a final season in the autumn. An accepted candidate for an organized sport must hold herself ready to practice during both seasons, unless disqualified by the physical examiner, and must confine herself to the one sport which she has chosen. During both seasons the members may be required to practice three times a week.

The Athletic Association, under its present constitution, dates from

March, 1908. All members of the college are eligible for membership, all members of the organized sports are ipso facto members of the association, and the Director of Physical Training is a member ex officio. An annual contribution of one dollar is solicited from each member of the association, and special funds are raised by voluntary contribution. In the year 1914- 1915, the association included about twelve hundred members, not all of them dues-paying, however.

The president of the Athletic Association is always a senior; the vice president, who is also chairman of the Field Day Committee, and the treasurer are juniors; the secretary and custodian are sophomores. The members of the Organized Sports elect their respective heads, and each sport is governed by its own rules and regulations and by such intersport legislation as is enacted by the Executive Board, not in contravention to regulations by the Department of Physical Training and Hygiene. In this way the association and the department work together for college health.

The organized sports at Wellesley are: rowing, golf, tennis, basket ball, field hockey, running, archery, and baseball. The unorganized sports include walking, riding, swimming, fencing, skating, and snowshoeing. Each sport has its instructor, or instructors, from the Department of Physical Training. The members are grouped in class squads governed by captains, and each class squad furnishes a class team whose members are awarded numerals, before a competitive class event, on the basis of records of health, discipline, and skill. Honors, blue W's worn on the sweaters, are awarded on a similar basis. Interclass competitions for trophies are held on Field Day, and the association hopes, with the development of outdoor baseball, to establish interhouse competitions also. The gala days are, besides Field Day in the autumn, the Indoor Meet in the spring at the end of the indoor practice, "Float" in June, and in winter, when the weather permits, an Ice Carnival on the lake.

Through the Athletic Association, new tennis courts have been laid out, the golf course has been remodeled, and the boathouse repaired. In 1915, it was making plans for a sheltered amphitheater, bleachers, and a baseball diamond; and despite the fact that dues are not obligatory, more and more students are coming to appreciate the work of the Association and to

assume responsibility toward it.

Wellesley does not believe in intercollegiate sports for women. In this opinion, the women's colleges seem to be agreed; it is one of the points at which they are content to diverge from the policy of the men's colleges. Wellesley's sports are organized to give recreation and healthful exercise to as many students as are fit and willing to take part in them. Some students even disapprove of interclass competitions, and it is thought that the interhouse teams for baseball will serve as an antidote to rivalry between the classes.

The only intercollegiate event in which Wellesley takes part is the intercollegiate debate. In this contest, Wellesley has been twice beaten by Vassar, but in March, 1914, she won in the debate against Mt. Holyoke, and in March, 1915, in the triangular debate, she defeated both Vassar and Mt. Holyoke.

In September, 1904, the college was granted a charter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Wellesley Chapter,--installed January 17, 1905, is known as the Eta of Massachusetts.