It is evident that Jack, the freedman, wandered into this Vermont town. He was without a family name, and no native Vermonter refers to the Empire State except as York State. Accordingly the newcomer became Jack York.

With satisfaction we note the evidences of humility. York was a notable personage, the only man of color in many towns. He might well have taken advantage of his position to reject the attentions of the common villagers, to move with hauteur among his neighbors, and to assume a lordly attitude in the presence of the Morrills, the Proctors, and the Coolidges. Fortunately there was nothing 'high hat' about York. He complacently shook hands with all who sought this privilege.

Very truly yours,

E. W. BUTTERFIELD

"Why, where have you lived all your life, if you ain't never seen a tempest?'

'I've lived most of my life near Boston.' 'Why, they do too have tempests in Boston! There, it's beginning to lighten now; do you mean to say you never saw no lightnin'?'

'Oh, do you mean a thunderstorm? Of course I've seen them, but I never heard them called tempests.'

A few weeks later another neighbor was describing the trouble her husband had had as a result of scratching his hand with a rusty nail. She told me how many incisions had to be made as the poison spread, and how often the doctor came one day. The account ended dramatically, 'Well, he'd like to have lost his arm!'

'He would!' I exclaimed, marveling at the man's strange taste. The good lady took my surprise as evidence that I was impressed by her husband's narrow escape.

This use of 'would like to have' must be a perversion of the obsolete form, 'was like to,' but, being generally used in connection with some unpleasant possibility, has a very bizarre effect upon the unaccustomed ear. One housekeeper, using a fuel new to her, 'would like to have burnt her pies up,' and another, driving a horse which ran away, 'would like to have got thrown out and killed.'

'Common,' to my mind synonymous with 'vulgar,' is used hereabouts to express a desirable quality. Yes, they 've got plenty of money, but you'll like her she's just as common!'

But alas, these local idioms are dying with the older generation. We shall soon be all so cosmopolitan that there will be left no more isolated communities with any smack of originality in their speech.

MRS. WENDELL B. PHILLIPS

***

Cape Cod-erisms.

DEAR ATLANTIC,

A recent article by one of the Contributors, concerning her confusion over the indeterminate manner of speech among New Englanders, reminded me of one or two amusing experiences at the beginning of my residence at the root of Cape Cod.

One summer day, as a dark cloud began to lower, a neighbor asked me, 'Are you afraid in a tempest?'

Now to my mind that word implied a storm in which a high wind was the distinguishing feature

such a storm as one reads of in stories of the tropics. So I answered, honestly enough, 'I don't believe I ever was in one.'

STEP by step with the recognition of the place of woman in the community has grown the need for educating her for that place. During the last two generations her right to the opportunities of higher education has been admitted, and institutions have sprung up to provide them. These institutions have now reached a crisis in their history which challenges the attention of anyone interested in the progress of our national culture.

There are seven such colleges alike enough in history, in development, and in present interests to be pondered on and discussed by their friends as a unit, and a composite picture of them may be used to illustrate the general situation in which many others share. They are not far from one another, four in Massachusetts, the other three within a radius of a hundred miles of New York, all in the northeastern corner of the country. Their nearness in age corresponds with their geographical nearness. Though Mount Holyoke's history as a seminary begins just short of a hundred years ago, as colleges they are

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I

none of them far from fifty: Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley have passed the half-century line; Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard will cross it shortly. And as they all of them represented the same period of American educational history in their founding, they arose from not dissimilar conditions and dealt with the same difficulties.

For the early years at least they made bricks with little straw. They had first to create their clientele, for communities on the whole looked on at the initial processes of this new education with little sympathy and no imagination, and discreet parents hesitated to trust their daughters to so untried a venture. The girls' schools and seminaries of the day had devised their own courses of study to prepare their pupils for careers as wives or maiden aunts with perhaps a year's fling at teaching; and it was a slow process either to persuade the older schools to change their ways or to encourage new schools which should lay the foundation for a further defined and difficult course and leave the fewest possible chinks of

preparation unfilled. The problem of the choice of teachers in the new colleges was perplexing, and as a matter of fact variously met, for in some cases it was thought unwise, and it was often difficult, to secure men as teachers, and yet the number of women who could themselves direct the work of college students was limited. With time a kind of equilibrium was reached in all the colleges, and faculties of both men and women with substantial scholastic training were built up. The early colleges had small endowments and could charge only small fees, with the result that teachers worked long and late for low salaries, and it was a slow and painful business to push up the original endowments so that there were more teachers more adequately paid. From the first no one of the colleges fought shy of the question of residence. All except the two city colleges, Radcliffe and Barnard, where a large fraction of the students lived in their own homes, built dormitories and brought their young women together; and this policy was of great advantage in adding to the formal training of the curriculum the wide education given by a common intellectual life outside the classroom or laboratory hour. In face of every difficulty of space or money the principle of the residence hall persisted.

With the original likenesses far outnumbering their differences, these seven women's colleges and with them and with them many others have traveled on their fifty-year road. There has been no marked divergence on the way, and naturally enough they find themselves still at one in their situation and interests. There has been a fairly general conversion of the community.. Many parents have concluded to educate their daughters at the same length and with the same thoroughness as

1 Radcliffe drew and draws all its teaching staff from the Harvard faculty.

their sons, and excellent schools, public and private, lay the foundations for college work. The original small endowments have been added to, and libraries and laboratories, as well as salaries, have been enlarged. Everywhere professional schools have been opened to properly trained women students. The hearts of communities have softened, bodies of alumnæ have grown up around each college, and each has made for itself friendships full of lively and generous interest. There is without question a glamour of temporal wellbeing around them all.

In reality, to the closer-seeing eye, beneath the glamour lie grave and immediate perplexities. The thoughtful friends of the colleges for women, who believe in their usefulness to the American community, and who see that this usefulness is ominously threatened, are themselves, as will be apparent, almost helpless in the matter. But they can at least set the situation as they see it before that community, concerned, as they believe it is, in the education of its women as well as its men.

II

In the seven colleges which are being used as roughly typical of all colleges for women, six hundred graduate students and eight thousand undergraduates are studying. The latter, living in college halls as they do, form more or less compactly woven communities. Against this arrangement can be advanced the reproach of an artificially contrived life, but at least two great advantages can be set down in its favor. First, it provides an atmosphere in which hard and continuous mental work is possible. In each instance the college has established its own campus,

2 Women graduate students in Columbia University register in the Graduate School, not in Barnard.

large or small, set its buildings together under the vines and fig trees it has planted, and thus ensured for the working days of the week a greater freedom from outside demands and from flickering momentary interests than can be possible in most homes. This advantage is not merely negative. In the hours rescued from interruption, hours which never appear on college schedules, it is possible for the student who wishes it to have many and rich contacts with the older scholars on the faculties as well as to plunge into discussion and feel the sharp goad of her contemporaries. Second, it brings the girl perforce into touch with a variety of human beings. The women's college is in every case the landlord of its shifting tenants. In not one has the sorority system with the sorority-controlled houses sprung up, bringing in its train

whatever its advantages may be the disadvantages of the small intimate group with its limited responsibility in contrast to the wider interests and the democratic rubbing of elbows of the larger college community. The sex and age of the individuals in the community may be monotonous, but little else about them is. The students who live in these halls and come and go together from the classrooms and libraries and playing fields are drawn from a wide range. Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley, for example, all in a single New England state, draw respectively sixty, sixty-six, and seventy per cent of their students from states outside New England. And wherever there is a graduate school the range is wider still.

Again, the students come into residence together from very varying conditions. Though the great mass are of that scripturally blessed class which has

About forty-five per cent of the undergraduate students at Harvard and about sixty per cent at Yale come from states outside New England.

neither poverty nor riches, in the student body is represented every kind of American home. The girls have been variously prepared. Forty-seven per cent are products of the public schools all over the country, thirty-one and one-half per cent of private schools of an equally wide range, and twenty-one and one-half per cent of a combination of the two. A few have prepared themselves. In the last few years more students have presented themselves than could be properly housed, fed, or taught by a conscientious administration, and, from the waiting list of girls ready to enter, it has consequently become possible to make some kind of selection. The method of this selection varies. A majority of the women's colleges have set the entrance examination as an important factor in the choice, and all of them study the testimony available in the minutiae of school reports, in the careful estimate of school faculties and principals, in personal interviews where possible, and in some form of mental test. No one of the colleges is entirely satisfied with its way of choosing, and every college tries incessantly to devise more accurate and satisfactory ways of choice.

With the students once admitted, and their own more direct responsibility begun, the women's colleges have tried to see that the work was well directed. With blood and sweat, presidents or faculty committees have tried to select for their faculties proved or potential scholars, and an effort has been made to make sure at the same time that these men and women are good teachers that they have both the dream and the interpretation thereof. On the whole the struggle has availed. The teaching staff holds a dignified and important part in the government of the college, in the devising of the curriculum, and in establishing the experiments in learning and teaching

by which the college is to grow in wisdom. Curricula are of late years forever in the melting pot. From the time of the great original experiment which was to prove that a woman could actually take a man's education, the women's colleges have never been afraid to experiment, though they have often had to look to their scanty resources and turn away from some tempting venture. The graduate schools of Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr, boldly established simultaneously with their undergraduate schools, at once made it possible for women to go beyond the limits of the first degree, and both colleges have made a generous number of fellowships and scholarships available. For ten years Wellesley has had a two-year course in physical education for young women already college graduates, which has set a standard for the teaching and practice of hygiene and physical training in schools for girls and colleges. Vassar's Department of Euthenics plans a completely new venture in the education of women to a particular end. Barnard's curriculum represents a bold step away from the old and rigid requirements of the academic college-none bolder, and an honors system is in operation at Smith which is far to the fore among the many plans of similarly experimenting colleges. Several of them have made noteworthy experiments in wider fields during the summer holidays of the college proper. Smith has a Graduate School for Social Work, begun as a part of its war service, but now holding an established position among institutions of its class; Mount Holyoke a school for the study of German, which is on the way to repeat for students and teachers what has already been done elsewhere for their confrères in French and Spanish. Vassar has established a summer Institute of Euthenics with a nursery school as its handmaid. Bryn

Mawr has for six years given over its buildings to a summer school for a hundred women workers in industry, an eight weeks' session, which has proved one of the most interesting experiments in adult education in the country; and Barnard has opened a similar school for workers in New York City, young women who cannot leave their homes but can study in a nonresident school.

The libraries and laboratories of the women's colleges are equal to those of many colleges for men, and in some cases superior in their resources. The work of the students is not seasonal; the steady routine of the year is not broken in on by feverish periods of intercollegiate athletics. But beyond and above all in importance, both to the individual college and to the whole group of women's colleges in the country, is the fact that, with all individual exceptions allowed for, there is in general an understanding between the women's college and the student that she has come to work seriously at a long and arduous task which is important for her as an individual, but also important because she is to be later a member of a community to which she must make a serious contribution. Not only the casual comment of the male members of her family in the president's office, but the more deliberate judgment of members of the faculty or staff who exchange the coeducational university or the men's college for a chair in a women's college, testifies generously to this. The undergraduates now at work in the women's colleges are a good gamble educationally.

That is known best, perhaps, by those who see them most. The community knows more directly through its experience of their mothers or sisters, of the many thousands of alumnæ who have been trained where the few thousands of undergraduates are studying now, that the new generations are in