elocution, trotting to chapel, and reading poetry with the
teacher of English literature, and it seems to make no difference
to Miss Howard and Mr. Durant whether the Latin, Greek and
Mathematics are well learned or not. The result is that l do
not have time to half learn my lessons. My real college work
is unsatisfactory, poorly done, and so of course amounts to
about nothing. l am not the only one that feels it, but every
member of the freshman class has the same feeling, and not only
the students but even the professors. You can have no idea of
how these very professors have worked to have things different
and have expostulated and expostulated with Mr. Durant, but all
to no avail. He is as hard as a flint and his mind is made up of
the most beautiful theories, but he is perfectly blind to facts.
He rules the college, from the amount of Latin we shall read to
the kind of meat we shall have for dinner; he even went out into
the kitchen the other day and told the cook not to waste so much
butter in making the hash, for I heard him myself.


We must remember that the writer is a young girl, intolerant, as
youth is always intolerant, and that she was writing only one month
after the college had opened. It is not to be expected that she
could understand the creative excitement under which the founder
was laboring in those first years. We, who look back, can appreciate
what it must have meant to a man of his imagination and intensity,
to see his ideal coming true; naturally, he could not keep his
hands off. And we must remember also that until his death Mr. Durant
met the yearly deficit of the college. This gave him a peculiar
claim to have his wishes carried out, whether in the classroom or
in the kitchen.