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 to time
he bought more land; he laid out avenues and planted them with
trees; and then, the little boy for whom all this joy and beauty
were destined fell ill of diphtheria and died, July 3, 1863,
after a short illness.

The effect upon the grief-stricken father was startling, and to
many who knew him and more who did not, it was incomprehensible.
In the quaint phraseology of one of his contemporaries, he had
"avoided the snares of infidelity" hitherto, but his religion had
been of a conventional type. During the child's illness he
underwent an old-fashioned religious conversion. The miracle
has happened before, to greater men, and the world has always
looked askance. Boston in 1863, and later, was no exception.

Mr. Durant's career as a lawyer had been brilliant and worldly;
he had rarely lost a case. In an article on "Anglo-American Memories"
which appeared in the New York Tribune in 1909, he is described
as having "a powerful head, chiseled features, black hair, which
he wore rather long, an olive complexion, and eyes which flashed