at first succeed. The matter of control was not easy to one who would not stoop to rigid mechanical means and who said, "One has not governed a child until she makes the child smile under her government." Besides, her sense of humor—later one of her chief assets—seemed at first to get in the way of her gaining a steady hold on the reins.

When she was tempted to give up in discouragement, she said to herself: "I know that good teachers are needed, and that I ought to teach. 'All that ought to be done can be done.'"

To one who worked earnestly in that spirit, success was sure. Five years later, two towns were vying with each other to secure her as a teacher in their academies for young ladies. For some time she taught at Derry, New Hampshire, during the warm months, going to her beloved Ashfield for the winter term. Wherever she was she drew pupils from the surrounding towns and even from beyond the borders of the State. Teachers left their schools to gather about her. She had the power to communicate something of her own enthusiasm and vitality. Bright eyes and alert faces testified to her power to quicken thought and to create an appetite for knowledge.

"Her memory has been to me continually an inspiration to overcome difficulties," said one of her pupils.

"You were the first friend who ever pointed out to me defects of character with the expectation that they would be removed," another pupil wrote in a letter of heartfelt gratitude.

At this time all the schools for girls, like the Ashfield Academy and Mr. Emerson's seminary at Byfield, were entirely dependent upon the enterprise and ideals of individuals. There were no colleges with buildings and equipment, such as furnished dormitories, libraries, and laboratories, belonging to the work and the future. In the case of the most successful schools there was no guarantee that they would endure beyond the lifetime of those whose interest had called them into being.

Miss Lyon taught happily for several years, often buying books of reference and material for practical illustration out of her salary of five or six dollars a week. The chance for personal influence seemed the one essential. "Never mind the brick and mortar!" she cried. "Only let us have the living minds to work upon!"

As experience came with the years, however, as she saw schools where a hundred young women were crowded into one room without black-boards, globes, maps, and other necessaries of instruction—she realized that something must be done to secure higher schools for girls, that would have the requisite material equipment for the present and security for the future. "We must provide a college for young women on the same conditions as those for men, with publicly owned buildings and fixed standards of work," she said.

This idea could appeal to most people of that day only as a strange, extravagant, and dangerous notion. Harvard and Yale existed to prepare men to be ministers, doctors, and lawyers. Did women expect to thrust themselves into the professions? Why should they want the learning of men? It could do nothing but make them unfit for their proper life in the home. Who had ever heard of a college for girls! What is unheard of is to most people manifestly absurd.

To Mary Lyon, however, difficulties were opportunities for truer effort and greater service. She had, besides, a faith in a higher power—in a Divine Builder of "houses not made with hands"—which led her to say with unshaken confidence, "'All that ought to be done can be done!'"

Mary Lyon chapel and administration hall

It was as if she were able to look into the future and see the way time would sift the works of the present. Those who looked into her earnest blue eyes, bright with courage, deep with understanding, could not but feel that she had the prophet's vision. It was as if she had power to divine the difference between the difficult and the impossible, and, knowing that, her faith in the happy outcome of her work was founded on a rock.

It took this faith and hope, together with an unfailing charity for the lack of vision in others and an ever-present sense of humor, to carry Mary Lyon through the task to which she now set herself. She was determined to open people's eyes to the need of giving girls a chance for a training that would fit them for more useful living by making them better teachers, wiser home-makers, and, in their own right, happier human beings. She must not only convince the conservative men and women of her day that education could do these things, but she must make that conviction so strong that they would be willing to give of their hard-earned substance to help along the good work.

Those were not the days of large fortunes. Miss Lyon could not depend upon winning the interest of a few powerful benefactors. She must enlist the support of the many who would be willing to share their little. She must perforce have the hardihood of the pioneer, no less than the vision of the seer, to enable her to meet the problems, trials, and rebuffs of the next few years.

"I learned twenty years ago not to get out of patience," she once said to some one who marveled at the unwearied good-humor with which she met the most exasperating circumstances.

First enlisting the assistance of a few earnest men to serve as trustees and promoters of the cause, she, herself, traveled from town to town, from village to village, and from house to house, telling over and over again the story of the Mount Holyoke to be, and what it was to mean to the daughters of New England. For the site in South Hadley, Massachusetts, had been early selected, and the name of the neighboring height, overlooking the Connecticut River, chosen by the girl who was born in the hills and who believed that it was good to climb.

"I wander about without a home," she wrote to her mother, "and scarcely know one week where I shall be the next."

All of her journeying was by stage, for at that time the only railroad in New England was the one, not yet completed, connecting Boston with Worcester and Lowell. To those who feared that even her robust health and radiant spirit could not long endure the strain of such a life, she said: "Our personal comforts are delightful, but not essential. Mount Holyoke means more than meat and sleep. Had I a thousand lives, I would sacrifice them all in suffering and hardship for its sake."

During these years Miss Lyon abundantly proved that the pioneer does not live by bread alone. Only by the vision of what his struggles will mean to those who come after to profit by his labors is his zeal fed. It seemed at the time when Mount Holyoke was only a dream of what might be, and in the anxious days of breaking ground which followed, that Miss Lyon's faith that difficulties are only opportunities in disguise was tried to the utmost. Just when her enthusiasm was arousing in the frugal, thrifty New Englanders a desire to give, out of their slender savings, a great financial panic swept over the country.

Miss Lyon's friends shook their heads. "You will have to wait for better times," they said. "It is impossible to go on with the undertaking now."

"When a thing ought to be done, it cannot be impossible," replied Miss Lyon. "Now is the only word that belongs to us; with the afterwhile we have nothing to do."

In that spirit she went on, and in that spirit girls who had been her pupils gave of their little stipends earned by