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UNESCO EIPICT MODULE 2. LESSON 1 1
Module 2
Introduction to Library
Automation
Lesson 1
What is Library Automation?

Rationale
ICTs have changed the way information is
created and distributed. They have also
changed the way libraries select, acquire,
organize and deliver information. Librarians
must adapt to this change and acquire skill in
using automated library systems. This lesson
will introduce the information professional to
library automation.

Scope
Library Automation
Automated/integrated library systems
Standards
o MARC
o Z39.50
Online public access catalog (OPAC)/WebOPAC
Available ALS/ILS
Benefits of library automation
Potential difficulties in implementing library
automation

Learning Outcomes
By the end of the lesson you should be able to:
Define library automation
Define an automated/integrated library system and
identify its general features
Be aware of standards
o MARC
o Z39.50?
Define an online public access catalog/Web
catalog
Be aware of available ALS/ILS
Identify the benefits of library automation
Identify potential difficulties in implementing library
automation

What is Library Automation?
Library automation is the
application of ICTs to library operations
and services. The functions that may be
automated are any or all of the following:
acquisition, cataloging, public access
(OPAC and WebPAC), indexing and
abstracting, circulation, serials
management, and reference.

What is an Integrated Library
System (ILS)?
An integrated library system is an
automated library system in which all of the
functional modules share a common
bibliographic database. In an integrated
system, there is only one bibliographic record
for a book. All transactions involving this book
are linked to its bibliographic record. For a
discussion of ILS go to:
www.odl.state.ok.us/servlibs/l-files/glossi.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_library_system

What are the Advantages of
an ILS?
There is no duplication of records since the
bibliographic database can be viewed
before new records are encoded.
Opportunities for errors are reduced since
the record is entered only once.
Library staff and patrons can view the status
of the material from the OPAC or WebPAC.
Library staff use the same masterfile for
cataloguing, circulation, the OPAC and
other services as needed.

What are the General
Features of an ILS?
Functional modules-- most systems offer:
cataloguing, OPAC and circulation. Some ILS also
have additional modules such as acquisitions,
serials management and WebPAC.
Operating systems—Some systems have
proprietary OS. Most systems use Windows. Some
use LINUX, an open source OS.
Database systems – major systems normally make
use of DBMS offered by vendors like Oracle and
Informix. Open source systems are also available
and downloadable from the Internet.

What are the General
Features of an ILS?(2)
Library automation standards
o Database structure—MARC21
o Protocol—Z39.50
o Search features
Network architecture – major systems run
on client-server architecture and use TCP-
IP to communicate across networks (LANs
and WANs)

The Cataloging Module
Used for the creation, storage, retrieval and
management of bibliographic records and/or
indexes.
Usually there are two different interfaces for search
and retrieval of the electronic catalog : one used by
the catalogers that allows them to maintain the
library database (the main cataloging module), and
one provided for users that allows them to search
and display the results – the Online Public Access
Catalog (OPAC).
A third interface for search and retrieval of the
catalog which may or may not be present in some
systems is the WebPAC

What is MARC?
The Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC)
formats are standards used for the
representation of bibliographic and related
information for books and other library
materials in machine-readable form and their
communication to and from other computers.
MARC 21 is the new standard for MARC. For
more information about the MARC 21
standard visit the following site:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marc.html

What is the Importance of
MARC?
The MARC format allows libraries to:
Describe resources in the format that will
enable the library to correctly print,
display, catalog records.
Search for and retrieve certain types of
information within specific fields
Have a common format that makes
sharing bibliographic resources with other
libraries possible
Easily migrate into another library system
without need for re-encoding records.

What is Z39.50?
Z39.50 is generally defined as the
information search and retrieval protocol
standard used primarily by library and
information related systems.
The standard specifies a client/server-
based protocol for searching and retrieving
information from remote databases
simultaneously using a single interface.
Read more about Z39.50 by reading this
article: “Z39.50. Part 1 - An Overview,” from
Biblio Tech Review at
http://www.bibliotech.com/html/z39_50.html
http://www.loc.gov/z3950

Why are Standards
Necessary?
Standards are necessary for networking and
for information exchange. For example:
MARC 21 and Z39.50 allow searching,
retrieval and exchange of records across
platforms
Unicode allows encoding, searching and
retrieval of information in different scripts.

The Online Public Access
Catalog (OPAC)
The OPAC is an electronic catalog. It
is the equivalent of the card catalog
but it is searchable online.
The OPAC could also be Web based
called a WebPAC. The WebPAC is
used by libraries to share bibliographic
information

The Circulation Module
The basic components of an integrated
library system are the cataloguing module,
the OPAC and the circulation module.
The circulation system is the transaction
module that allows the system to loan out
and receive returned materials. The
transactions are automatically linked to the
cataloguing module to enable users to find
out if materials are available for loan or
have been borrowed.

What are the Other Modules
in an ILS?
The basic modules are cataloguing,
circulation and the OPAC
Other modules which may be present are:
o Serials management
o Acquisitions
o Interlibrary loan
For a discussion of ILS modules please go
to “Integrated Library System Reports:
Vendors info.” URL:
http://www.ilsr.com/search2.cfm

LAN Server
Cataloguing
Acquisition
Indexing
and abstracting
Circulation
Reference
Serials
OPAC
Web Server
WebPAC
An Integrated Library System with Web
Access

Off-the-shelf or
Customization?
There are many commercial systems that
are available off-the-shelf. These systems
observe standards for ILS. However, the
needs of libraries are not always met by
these systems.
There are also open-source systems that
can be downloaded from the Internet.
Some are not open-source but are also free.
Many libraries still develop their own ILS.

Commercial Library Systems
Access the following sites to know more about
the integrated library systems available on
the market:
AcqWeb's Guide to Automated Library Systems,
Library Software, Hardware and Consulting
Companies
http://acqweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/pubr/opac.html
Integrated Library System Reports: Vendors info
http://www.ilsr.com/search2.cfm

Open Source Library Systems
The open source
model is a collaborative
programming infrastructure
that co-opts copyright law by
freely releasing source code
to the general public for any
use, modification, and
redistribution without licensing
restrictions…(Open Source
Initiative 2003)
Avanti
PYTHEAS (OSDLS)
Learning Access ILS
phpMyLibrary
GNUTeca
OpenBiblio
Firefly
Greenstone
Koha

Benefits of Library
Automation
Improved productivity/efficiency
Better use of information resources through
improved access
Improved resource sharing through the
virtual catalog or network
o Facilitates interlibrary loan
o Reduces duplication
o Avoids duplication of cataloguing effort
Optimizes the use of human and other
resources
Enhances the national and regional
information infrastructure

Benefits to Staff
Development of new patterns of
communication among staff, especially
between computer services and library
staff
Empowerment of the staff in making
decisions
Acquisition of new skills and knowledge

Potential Difficulties
Fear of adverse impact on employment
Apprehension that the technology could
be too expensive
The library staff have to undergo
extensive training. New knowledge and
skills are needed.
Lack of support from the management,
may be owing to budget constraints
The need to convert data into machine
readable form

Conclusion
Benefits outweigh disadvantages
ICTs are here to stay and society is
becoming an information society
demanding the use of ICTs to
improve access to information.

Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics

day. We never liked it so well as going to Jamestown; neither did
father.

2
I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST
Five years went by in the house on the hill, and then in 1870
when I was thirteen I found myself in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in a
new house my father had built. How characteristic of the instability
of the oil towns of that day, as well as of the frugality of my father,
was this house! From the beginning of the Pithole excitement he
had, as I have said, made money—more than he could ever have
dreamed, I fancy; and then about 1869 practically without warning
the bottom fell out, as the vernacular of the region put it. The end
shut up my father’s shops there, but it also gave us the makings of a
home. In that rapid development, only four years long, a town of
some twenty thousand had grown up with several big hotels—
among them, one called the Bonta House. It had features which
delighted my father—long French windows, really fine iron brackets
supporting its verandahs, handsome woodwork. The Bonta House
was said to have cost $60,000, but its owners were glad to take the
$600 father offered when the town “blew up.” He paid the money,
tore down the building, loaded its iron brackets and fine doors and
windows, mouldings and all, and I suppose much of its timber, onto
wagons and carted it ten miles away to Titusville where, out of it, he
built the house which was our home for many years.
Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from
the mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a
substantial settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small
but sturdy with a few families who had made money chiefly in
lumber, owning good homes, carefully guarding the order and
decency of the place.

The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of
fortune seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback,
wagon. The nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and
the roads and fields leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by
the heavy hauling, its streets at times impassable with mud.
The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the
bigger it grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of
all this activity, as well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish
food and shelter for caravans of strangers, shops for their trades,
offices for speculators and brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases,
for oil producers, surveyors, and draftsmen—all the factors of the big
business organization necessary to develop the industry. In 1862 the
overflow was doubled by the arrival of a railroad with a connection
sixteen miles away with the East and West. The disbanding of the
Army in June of 1865 brought a new rush—men still in uniform, their
rifles and knapsacks on their backs. Most of this fresh inflow was
bound to the scene of the latest excitement, Pithole.
Stampeded though she was, Titusville refused to give up her idea
of what a town should be. She kept a kind of order, waged a steady
fight on pickpockets, drunkards, wantons; and in this she was
backed by the growing number of men and women who, having
found their chance for fortune in oil, wanted a town fit for their
families. After churches, the schools were receiving the most
attention. It was the Titusville schools which had determined my
father and mother to make the town their permanent home.
But school did not play a serious part in my scheme of things at
the start. I went because I was sent, and had no interest in what
went on. I was thirteen, but I had never been in a crowded room
before. In a small private school the teacher had been my friend.
Here I was not conscious my teacher recognized my existence. I
soon became a truant; but the competent ruler of that schoolroom
knew more than I realized. She was able to spot a truant, and one
day when I turned up after an unexplainable absence she suddenly
turned on me and read me a scathing lecture. I cannot remember
that I was ashamed or humiliated, only amazed, but something in

me asserted itself. I suppose that here a decent respect for the
opinions of mankind was born; at least I became on the instant a
model pupil.
A few months later I passed into high school; and when at the
end of the year the grades were averaged at a ceremony where
everybody was present I stood at the head of the honor roll. Nobody
could have been more surprised. I had not been working for the
honor roll: I had simply been doing what they expected me to do as
I understood it, and here I was at the top. I remember I felt very
serious about it. Having made the top once, I knew what would be
expected of me. I couldn’t let my father and mother or my teachers
down, so I continued to learn my lessons. It was a good deal like
being good at a game. I liked to work out the mathematics and
translations—good puzzles, but that they had any relation to my life
I was unconscious. And then suddenly, among these puzzles I was
set to solve, I found in certain textbooks the sesame which was to
free my curiosity, stir desires to know, set me working on my own to
find out more than these books had to offer. The texts which did all
this for me were a series I suspect a modern teacher might laugh at
—Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural
Philosophy, Chemistry.
Here I was suddenly on a ground which meant something to me.
From childhood, plants, insects, stones were what I saw when I
went abroad, what I brought home to press, to put into bottles, to
“litter up the house.” The hills about Rouseville were rich in treasures
for such a collector, but nobody had ever taught me more than their
common names. I had never realized that they were subjects for
study, like Latin and geometry and rhetoric and other such
unmeaning tasks. They were too fascinating. But here my pleasure
became my duty. School suddenly became exciting. Now I could
justify my tramps before breakfast on the hills, justify my
“collections,” and soon I knew what I was to be—a scientist. Life was
beginning to be very good, for what I liked best to do had a reason.
No doubt this uplift was helped by the general cheerfulness of the
family under our new conditions of life.

Things were going well in father’s business; there was ease such
as we had never known, luxuries we had never heard of. Our first
Christmas in the new home was celebrated lavishly. Far away was
that first Christmas in the shanty on the flats when there was
nothing but nuts and candy and my mother and father promising,
“Just wait, just wait, the day will come.” The day had come—a
gorgeous Christmas tree, a velvet cloak, and a fur coat for my
mother. I haven’t the least idea what there was for the rest of us,
but those coats were an epoch in my life—my first notion of
elegance.
This family blossoming was characteristic of the town. Titusville
was gay, confident of its future. It was spending money on schools
and churches, was building an Opera House where Janauschek soon
was to play, Christine Nilsson to sing. More and more fine homes
were going up. Its main street had been graded and worked until
fine afternoons, winter and summer, it was cleared by four o’clock
for the trotting of the fast horses the rich were importing. When
New Year’s Day came every woman received—wine, cakes, salads,
cold meats on the table—every man went calling. That is, Titusville
was taking on metropolitan airs, led by a few citizens who knew New
York and its ways, even spoke familiarly of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk,
both of whom naturally enough had their eye on us. Did not the Erie
road from which they at the moment were filling their pockets
regard oil as one of its most profitable freights? We were grain for
their mill.
There was reason for confidence. In the dozen years since the first
well was drilled the Oil Creek Valley had yielded nearly thirty-three
million barrels of crude oil. Producing, transporting, refining,
marketing, exporting, and by-products had been developed into an
organized industry which was now believed to have a splendid
future.
Then suddenly this gay, prosperous town received a blow between
the eyes. Self-dependent in all but transportation and locally in that
through the pipe lines it was rapidly laying to shipping points, it was
dependent on the railroads for the carrying of its crude oil to outside

refining points and for a shipping of both crude and refined to the
seaboard—a rich and steady traffic for which the Oil Region felt the
railroads ought to be grateful; but it was the railroads that struck the
blow. A few refiners outside the region—Cleveland, Pittsburgh,
Philadelphia—concocted a marvelous scheme which they had the
persuasive power to put over with the railroads, a big scheme by
which those in the ring would be able to ship crude and refined oil
more cheaply than anybody outside. And then, marvelous invention,
they would receive in addition to their advantage a drawback on
every barrel of oil shipped by any one not in the group. Those in the
South Improvement Company, as the masterpiece was called, were
to be rewarded for shipping; and those not in, to be doubly
penalized. Of course it was a secret scheme. The Oil Region did not
learn of it until it had actually been put into operation in Cleveland,
Ohio, and leaked out. What did it mean to the Oil Region? It meant
that the man who produced the oil, and all outside refiners, were
entirely at the mercy of this group who, if they would, could make
the price of crude oil as well as refined. But it was a plan which
could not survive daylight. As soon as the Oil Region learned of it a
wonderful row followed. There were nightly antimonopoly meetings,
violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members
of the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground,
their buyers turned out of the oil exchanges; appeals were made to
the state legislature, to Congress for an interstate commerce bill,
producers and refiners uniting for protection. I remember a night
when my father came home with a grim look on his face and told
how he with scores of other producers had signed a pledge not to
sell to the Cleveland ogre that alone had profited from the scheme—
a new name, that of the Standard Oil Company, replacing the name
South Improvement Company in popular contempt.
There were long days of excitement. Father coming home at night,
silent and stern, a sternness even unchanged by his after-dinner
cigar, which had come to stand in my mind as the sign of his
relaxation after a hard day. He no longer told of the funny things he
had seen and heard during the day; he no longer played his jew’s-

harp, nor sang to my little sister on the arm of his chair the verses
we had all been brought up on:
Augusta, Maine, on the Kennebec River,
Concord, New Hampshire, on the Merrimack, etc.
The commotion spread. The leaders of the New York Petroleum
Association left out of the original conspiracy, and in a number of
cases (as was soon to be shown) outraged chiefly for that reason,
sent a committee to the Oil Region to see what was doing. The
committee was joyfully welcomed, partly because its chairman was
well known to them all. It was my Rouseville neighbor, Henry H.
Rogers.
Mr. Rogers had left the Creek in 1867 and become a partner in the
Pratt firm of refiners and exporters of Brooklyn, New York. He and
his associates saw as clearly as his old friends in the Oil Region that
—let the South Improvement Company succeed in its plan for a
monopoly—everybody not in the ring would be forced to go out of
business. The New York men seem to have been convinced that the
plans for saving themselves which the organized producers and
refiners were laying stood a good chance of success, for back in New
York Mr. Rogers gave a long interview to the Herald. He did not
mince words. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were “straining every nerve
to create a monopoly.” They would succeed if their control of the
railroads continued. He and his fellows felt as the men in the Oil
Region did, that the breaking up of the South Improvement
Company was a “necessity for self-existence.” They were as bold in
action as in words, for when a little later the president of the
Standard Oil Company of Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller (to date, the
only beneficiary of the South Improvement Company), sought an
interview in New York with Mr. Rogers and his committee he was
treated cavalierly and according to the newspapers retreated after a
brief reception “looking badly crestfallen.”
Thus was the Henry H. Rogers of 1872.
Out of the long struggle begun as a scrimmage came finally a well
developed cooperative movement guaranteeing fair play all around.

It was signed by the Standard Oil Company’s representative and all
the oil-carrying railroads. The railroads indeed were the first to
succumb, knowing as they did that what they were doing was
contrary to the common law of the land, and being thundered at as
they were by the press and politicians of all the country. “I told Willie
not to go into that scheme,” said old Commodore Vanderbilt; and Jay
Gould whined, “I didn’t sign until everybody else had.”
Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from
my father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold—that what had
been undertaken was wrong. My father told me it was as if
somebody had tried to crowd me off the road. Now I knew very well
that, on this road where our little white horse trotted up and down,
we had our side, there were rules, you couldn’t use the road unless
you obeyed those rules, it was not only bad manners but dangerous
to attempt to disobey them. The railroads—so said my father—ran
through the valley by the consent of the people; they had given
them a right of way. The road on which I trotted was a right of way.
One man had the same right as another, but the railroads had given
to one something they would not give to another. It was wrong. I
sometimes hear learned people arguing that in the days of this
historic quarrel everybody took rebates, it was the accepted way. If
they had lived in the Oil Region through those days in 1872, they
would have realized that, far from being accepted, it was fought
tooth and nail. Everybody did not do it. In the nature of the offense
everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the railroads the
privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never dared
give the privilege save under promise of secrecy.
In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.
He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics,
sound democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the
secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man. It was
that choice made by powerful men that suddenly confronted the Oil
Region. The sly, secret, greedy way won in the end, and bitterness
and unhappiness and incalculable ethical deterioration for the
country at large came out of that struggle and others like it which

were going on all over the country—an old struggle with old defeats
but never without men willing to make stiff fights for their rights,
even if it cost them all they ever hoped to possess.
At all events, uncomprehending as I was in that fine fight, there
was born in me a hatred of privilege—privilege of any sort. It was all
pretty hazy to be sure, but still it was well, at fifteen, to have one
definite plank based on things seen and heard, ready for a future
platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my
need of one. At the moment, however, my reflection did not carry
me beyond the wrongness of the privilege which had so upset our
world, contradicting as it did the principle of consideration for others
which had always been basic in our family and religious teaching. I
could not think further in this direction, for now my whole mind was
absorbed by the overwhelming discovery that the world was not
made in six days of twenty-four hours each.
My interest in science, which meant for me simply larger
familiarity with plants and animals and rocks, had set me looking
over my father’s books. Among them I found Hugh Miller’s
“Testimony of the Rocks,” and sat down to read it. Gradually I
grasped with a combination of horror and amazement that, instead
of a creation, the earth was a growth—that the creative days I had
so clearly visualized were periods, eons long, not to be visualized. It
was all too clear to deny, backed as it was by a wealth of geological
facts. If this were true, why did the Bible describe so particularly the
work of each day, describe it and declare, “And the evening and the
morning were the first day,” etc., and end, “and he rested on the
seventh day”? Hugh Miller labored to prove that there was no
necessary contradiction between Genesis and Geology. But I was too
startled to accept what he said. A Bible that needed reconciling, that
did not mean what it said, was not the rock I had supposed my feet
were on; that words could have other meaning than that I had
always given them, I had not yet grasped.
I was soon to find that the biblical day was disturbing a great part
of the Christian world, was a chief point of controversy in the
church. I had hardly made my discovery when Genesis and Geology

appeared in the pulpit of the Methodist Church of Titusville,
Pennsylvania. Filling this pulpit at that time was a remarkable and
brilliant man, Amos Norton Craft. Dr. Craft was an indefatigable
student. It was told of him to the wonder of the church that he laid
aside yearly $200 of his meager salary to buy books. Like all the
ministers of those days, he was obliged to face the challenges of
science. Many of his fellows—most of them, so far as my knowledge
went—took refuge in heated declarations that the conclusions that
science was making were profane, godless, an affront to divinity. Not
so Dr. Craft. He accepted them, strove to fit them into the Christian
system. He startled his congregation and interested the town
profoundly by announcing an evening course of lectures on the
reconciliation of Genesis and Geology. The first of the series dealt
with the universe. I had never known there was one. The stars, yes.
I could name planets and constellations and liked nothing better
than to lie on my back and watch them; but a universe with figures
of its size was staggering. I went away from those Sunday night
lectures fascinated, horror-stricken, confused—a most miserable
child, for not only was my idea of the world shattered, not only was
I left dizzily gyrating in a space to which there was no end, but the
whole Christian system I had been taught was falling in a general
ruin. I began to feel that I ought to leave the church. I did not
believe what I was supposed to believe. I did not have the
consolation of pride in emancipation which I find youth frequently
has when it finds itself obliged to desert the views it has been
taught. Indeed, I doubted greatly whether it was an emancipation.
What troubled me most was that if I gave up the church I had
nothing to put in place of something it had given me which seemed
to me of supreme importance; summed up, that something was in
the commandment, “Do as you would be done by.” Certainly nothing
which Hugh Miller or Herbert Spencer, whom I began to read in 1872
in the Popular Science Monthly, helped me here. They gave me
nothing to take the place of what had always been the unwritten law
of the Tarbell household, based as I knew upon the teachings of the
Bible. The gist of the Bible, as it had come to me, was what I later
came to call the brotherhood of man. Practically it was that we

should do nothing, say nothing, that injured another. That was a
catastrophe, and when it happened in our household—an inarticulate
household on the whole, though one extraordinarily conscious of the
minds and hearts of one another—when it happened the whole
household was shadowed for hours and it was not until by sensitive
unspoken efforts the injured one had been consoled, that we went
on about our usual ways.
This was something too precious to give up, and something for
which I did not find a substitute in the scientific thinking and arguing
in which I was floundering. The scientists offered me nothing to
guide me in human relations, and they did not satisfy a craving from
which I could not escape; that was the need of direction, the need
of that which I called God and which I still call God. Perhaps I was a
calculating person, a cautious one. At all events I made up my mind
to wait and find out something which better took the place of those
things which I so valued. It cost me curious little compromises,
compromises that I had to argue myself into. The chief came in
repeating the creed.
I could repeat, “conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary,” because for many years I did not know what that meant. It
was the resurrection that disturbed me. I could not accept it, nor
could I accept the promise of personal immortality. That had become
a grave doubt with me when I first grew dizzy with the
consciousness of the vastness of the universe. Why should I expect
to exist forever as a conscious mind in that vast emptiness? What
would become of me? I did not want to think about it, and I came
then to a conviction that has never left me: that as far as I am
concerned immortality is not my business, that there is too much for
me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the
immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my
effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance
about the affairs of the next world. I say this with humility, for I
believe that some such assurance is necessary to the peace and
usefulness of many persons, and I am the last to scoff at the
revelations they claim.

And yet it was hard to give up heaven. Among the books on our
shelves—many of them orthodox religious books—was one that had
a frontispiece which I had accepted as a definite picture of the
heaven to which I was to go. Jehovah sat on a throne, cherubim and
seraphim around him, rank upon rank of angels filling the great
amphitheater below. I always wondered where my place would be,
and whether there would be any chance to work up in heaven as
there seemed to be on earth, to become a cherub.
But giving up this heaven was by no means the greatest tragedy
in my discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-
four hours each. The real tragedy was the birth in me of doubt and
uncertainty. Nothing was ever again to be final. Always I was to ask
myself when confronted with a problem, a system, a scheme, a
code, a leader, “How can I accept without knowing more?” The
quest of the truth had been born in me—the most tragic and
incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.
It was while groping my way, frightened like a lost child, I found a
word to hold to—evolution. Things grew. What did they grow from?
They all started somewhere. I was soon applying the idea. Nothing
seemed to matter now, except to find the starting point of things
and, having that, see why and how they grew into something else.
How were you to go to work to find the start of life? With a
microscope. And I soon was in the heat of my first intellectual
passion, my first and greatest—that for the microscope. With a
microscope I could perhaps get an answer to my mystification about
the beginning of life, where it started; and then, I believed, I should
find God again.
I was a practical person apparently, for I at once began to save
my money and soon had enough to put into a small instrument. The
house in Titusville, like many of its period, had a tower room, a
steep staircase running up to it. This room was surrounded on three
sides with big double windows. I begged to have it for my own. Here
I was allowed to set up shop; here I had my desk, my papers, and
my microscope; here I was alone with my problems. That little
microscope had a good deal to do with my determination to go to

college. If I was to become a microscopist—I had already adopted
that word—I must study, get an education.
This determination of mine to get an education, go to college, was
chiefly due, no doubt, to the active crusade going on in those days
for what we called woman’s rights. Ours was a yeasty time, the
ferment reaching into every relation of life, attacking and remodeling
every tradition, every philosophy. As my father was hard hit by the
attack on his conception of individualism in a democracy—freedom
with strictest consideration for the rights and needs of others—as I
was struggling with all the handicaps of my ignorance, with the
nature of life, a search for God, so my mother was facing a little
reluctantly a readjustment of her status in the home and in society.
She had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she
never married, I feel sure she would have sought to “vindicate her
sex” by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession. The fight
would have delighted her. If she had gone to Iowa she surely would
have soon joined the agitation led there in the late fifties by Amelia
Bloomer, the inventor of the practical and ugly costume which still
carries her name, the real founder of dress reform. We owe it to
Amelia Bloomer that we can without public ridicule wear short skirts
and stout boots, be as sensible as our feminine natures permit—
which is not saying much for us when it comes to fashions. But my
mother found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the
sternest of problems which were to be settled only by immediate
individual effort and good will.
The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch
with the crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place
of the earlier movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had
slowed up that agitation; indeed, many of its best talking points had
been conceded and were slowly going into practice. Most of the
militants had thrown themselves into war work and, after the war,
into the campaign for negro suffrage; but the passing of the
Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the first time introducing the
word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a sense of outrage, not
only in the advocates of equal rights but in many women who had

not approved of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders, failing to keep
the humiliating distinction out of the Amendment, began a
tremendous national crusade for woman’s suffrage. They marshaled
a group of splendid women and undertook an intensive campaign
meant to reach every woman in the country. It reached us in
Titusville, even reached our home where my father and mother,
always hospitable to crusaders, opened their doors to them. I
remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard—not that either
touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was acutely conscious. I
noted, too, that the men we entertained did notice me, talked to me
as a person—not merely as a possible member of a society they
were promoting. There was Neal Dow—father by this time was a
prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante with Gustave Doré’s
pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.
As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that
it was far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and
followers were spending almost as much time disapproving of one
another’s methods as fighting for their cause. The friction came
largely from the propensity of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to
form alliances shocking to many of their oldest and wisest friends.
Before the war they had, rather recklessly from a political point of
view, supported easier divorce. As one of their friends wrote them,
they had in so doing broken the heart of the portly Evening Post and
nearly driven the Tribune to the grave. Time had not cooled their
ardor for strange bedfellows. They made an alliance now of which I
heard no little talk by my mother and her friends; it was with the
two most notorious women in the eye of the public at the moment.
“Hussies,” conservative circles in Titusville, Pennsylvania, called them
—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.
It was not difficult for even a girl of fifteen to pick up some idea of
what these women were, so well did they advertise themselves, and
so delightedly did the press back them up in their doings. Beginning
their careers as clairvoyants, they had developed professionally their
undoubted powers until they were in the sixties—the two best

known and best paid trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed
to have raised a child from the dead, and Tennessee, the harder
worker of the two, made enough money to keep thirty-five relations
in comfort. “If I am a humbug sometimes, look at the dead beats I
have to support,” was her answer to those who accused her of
abusing her talents. Both women frankly advocated free love, and so
it was believed quite as frankly practiced it.
With this equipment they entered Wall Street in the eighteen-
sixties as consultants. The “lady brokers,” they were called. They
quickly built up a profitable business. Old Commodore Vanderbilt
was so tickled by their combination of beauty and effrontery, talents
and ambitions, that he is said to have proposed marriage to Victoria.
He was more valuable as a friend. She kept his picture on the wall of
the salon where she received her clients, and under it the framed
motto, “Simply to thy cross I cling.”
In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for
President in 1872. So successful was she in attracting and holding
big audiences, and so brilliantly did she present the arguments for
equal rights, that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony threw scruples to
the wind and took her into their camp—from which promptly there
was a considerable exodus of scandalized ladies. Not only did
Victoria win the countenance of these two great leaders, but she
involved them in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which for months she
worked steadily to force before the public.
The reverberations of the conflict inside the suffrage party,
together with what I picked up about the Beecher trial (I read the
testimony word by word in our newspapers), did not increase my
regard for my sex. They did not seem to substantiate what I heard
about the subjection of women, nor did what I observed nearer
home convince me. Subjection seemed to me fairly divided. That is
all: I saw there were “henpecked men,” as well as “downtrodden
women.” The chief unfairness which I recognized was in the
handling of household expenses. Women who must do the spending
were obliged to ask for money or depend on charging. My mother
had not been trained to live on as generous a scale as was now

possible, but my father never said, “We have so much and no more
to spend.” They worked often at cross purposes. So I gathered as I
listened to intimate talks between women, listened to suffrage
speakers, read the literature; so did many American husbands and
wives. I felt no restraint myself, for I always had at least a little
money and I, too, could charge. This foolish practice led me into
funny expenditures.
I had no sense of the appropriate in clothes. Often I had an
ardent desire for something fitted only for grown-ups, and I always
had a keen ambition to fit myself out for occasions. Some time in the
early seventies Clara Louise Kellogg came to town. My father and
mother were in the West, but they had arranged that I was to hear
her. It seemed as if some kind of regalia was necessary, so I charged
a wide pink sash and a pair of yellow kid gloves.
Out of the agitation for rights as it came to me, two rights that
were worth going after quite definitely segregated themselves: the
right to an education, and the right to earn my living—education and
economic independence.
The older I grew, the more determined I became to be
independent. I saw only one way—teach; but if I was to teach I
must fit myself, go to college. My father and mother agreed. I had a
clear notion of what I wanted to teach—natural science, particularly
the microscope, for I was to be a biologist. I made my choice—
Cornell, first opened to women in 1872; but at the moment when
the steps to enter Cornell were to be taken, there appeared in the
household as an over-Sunday guest the president of a small college
in our neighborhood, only thirty miles away, Allegheny. Among the
patrons of that college was the Methodist organization known as the
Erie Conference, to which the Titusville church belonged. I had
heard of it annually when a representative appeared in our pulpit,
told its story and asked for support. The president, Dr. Lucius
Bugbee, was a delightful and entertaining guest and, learning that I
was headed Cornellward, adroitly painted the advantages of
Allegheny. It was near home; it was a ward of our church. It had

responded to the cry of women for educational opportunity and had
opened its doors before the institution I had chosen.
Was not here an opportunity for a serious young woman
interested in the advancement of her sex? Had I not a responsibility
in the matter? If the few colleges that had opened their doors were
to keep them open, if others were to imitate their example, two
things were essential: women must prove they wanted a college
education by supporting those in their vicinity; and they must prove
by their scholarship what many doubted—that they had minds as
capable of development as young men. Allegheny had not a large
territory to draw from. I must be a pioneer.
As a matter of fact the only responsibility I had felt and assumed
in going to college was entirely selfish and personal. But the sense
of responsibility was not lacking nor dormant in me. It was one of
the few things I had found out about myself in the shanty on the
flats when I was six years old and there was a new baby in the
family.
The woman looking after my mother had said, “Now you are old
enough to make a cup of tea and take it to her.” I think, in all my life
since, nothing has seemed more important, more wonderful to me
than this being called upon by an elder to do something for mother,
be responsible for it. I can feel that cup in my hand as I cautiously
took it to the bed, and can see my mother’s touching smile as she
thanked me. Perhaps there came to her a realization that this
rebelling, experimenting child might one day become a partner in
the struggle for life so serious for her at the moment, always to be
more or less serious.
But to return to Dr. Bugbee and his argument; before he left the
house I had agreed to enter Allegheny in the fall of 1876. And that I
did.
What did I take with me? Well, I took what from my earliest years
I had been told was necessary to everyone—a Purpose, always
spelled with a capital. I had an outline of the route which would lead
to its realization. Making outlines of what was in my mind was the

one and only fruit that I had gathered so far from long terms of
struggle over grammar, rhetoric, composition. Outlines which held
together, I had discovered, cleared my mind, gave it something to
follow. I outlined all my plans as I had diagramed sentences. It was
not a poor beginning for one who eventually, and by accident rather
than by intention, was to earn her living by writing—the core of
which must be sound structure.
One thing by choice left out of the plan I carried from high school
was marriage. I would never marry. It would interfere with my plan;
it would fetter my freedom. I didn’t quite know what Freedom
meant; certainly I was far from realizing that it exists only in the
spirit, never in human relations, never in human activities—that the
road to it is as often as not what men call bondage. But above all I
must be free; and to be free I must be a spinster. When I was
fourteen I was praying God on my knees to keep me from marriage.
I suspect that it was only an echo of the strident feminine cry filling
the air at that moment, the cry that woman was a slave in a man-
made world. By the time I was ready to go to college I had changed
my prayer for freedom to a will to freedom. Such was the baggage I
carried to college, where I was soon to find several things I had not
counted on.

3
A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE
EIGHTIES
When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my
first contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I
knew only the beginning of things, the making of a home in a
wilderness, the making of an industry from the ground up. I had
seen the hardships of beginnings, the joy of realization, the attacks
that success must expect; but of things with a past, things that had
made themselves permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me full in the
face now, for this was an old college as things west of the
Alleghenies were reckoned—an old college in an old town. Here was
history, and I had never met it before to recognize it.
The town lay in the valley of a tributary of the Allegheny River—
French Creek. Its oldest tradition after the tales of Indians was that
George Washington once drank from a spring on the edge of the
campus. Certainly he passed that way in 1753 when he came up the
river valley from Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh), following the route
which led to Fort Le Bœuf near Lake Erie. He comments in his diary,
published the year after his trip, on the extensive rich meadows
through which he had passed, one of which “I believe was nearly
four miles in length and considerable wider in some places.” To this
particular “rich meadow” a few years later came one David Mead
and laid out a town and sold land. Here soon after came the
representative of the Holland Land Company, colonizers of first
quality. Good men came, distinguished names in Pennsylvania’s
history, and they wanted a college. The answer to their wish came in

1815 when one of the most scholarly men of that day, Timothy
Alden of Massachusetts, heard their call and, picking up all his
worldly possessions, made the two months’ trip by coach and boat
to the settlement called Meadville.
Timothy Alden, like many of his fellows, was fired by a deep belief
that through Christian democracy alone could men arrive at the
better world towards which he, scholar that he was, knew they had
been groping from their earliest beginnings. But men could only
come to an understanding of their individual and collective
responsibilities to democracy through education. Therefore, as men
spread westward he and others like him must follow them with
education.
But once in Meadville how little he found with which to carry out
his project—a log courthouse for a schoolhouse, and little or no
money, though of what they had men gave freely. Now Timothy
Alden knew that throughout the East were men of scholarly
traditions convinced as was he that democracy would work only if
men were trained to understanding and sacrifice. He believed that
they would help his Western venture. In 1816 he went East to find
out. He was not wrong in thinking there would be sympathy for the
young college. Out of their meager store men gave—this one, fifty
cents; that one, five dollars; few, more—and men gave books, one,
two, five. The list of donors now in the college archives shows many
of the best known names of the day—Lowell, Adams, Tucker,
Parkman, Channing in Boston and twenty-nine fine New York names.
Friends were made for Allegheny in every town and city where its
brave story was told. Timothy Alden came back with $361 in money
and with books, more needed than money, estimated to be worth
$1,642.26.
From that time he kept the undertaking steadily before the East,
promoted it by every method known to the times. A great response
to his passionate effort came in 1819 when the college world of the
East was shocked by learning that William Bentley of Salem,
Massachusetts, had left his famous collection of “classical and
theological books, dictionaries, lexicons and Bibles” to a college in

the wilderness of northwestern Pennsylvania, a college without a
home, still doing its work in a log courthouse. That gift, long a bitter
drop in the cup of Harvard, it is said, made a home of its own
necessity for Allegheny, and in 1820 the corner stone of Bentley Hall,
named for the donor, was laid. It took many years to complete it;
but, when done on the lines Timothy Alden had himself laid down, it
was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country. Today it
easily stands after Independence Hall as the most perfect piece of
Colonial architecture in the state of Pennsylvania. For me Bentley
Hall was an extraordinary experience. It was the first really beautiful
building I had seen, a revelation, something I had never dreamed of.
Fifty-six years had passed since the corner stone of Bentley Hall
was laid, and not one of them without disappointments and
sacrifices. More than once it had seemed as if the brave attempt
must fail. Two buildings only had been added in these years: Culver
Hall, a frame boarding house for men; Ruter Hall, a grim
uncompromising three-story rectangular brick structure, fifty by
ninety feet in size, a perfect reflection of the straitened period to
which it belonged. The “Factory” was our slighting name for Ruter
Hall, but in this stern structure I was to find a second deep
satisfaction—the library; in a room on the top floor, ninety feet long
and at least sixteen in height was housed not only the splendid
Bentley collection, but one even more valuable, that of Judge James
Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, rare volumes from the great
presses of Europe, three tons of books brought overland in wagons
by Boston teamsters in 1822. They lined the great unbroken inside
wall, as well as every space between openings. From the window
seats one looked out on the town in the valley, its roofs and towers
half hidden by a wealth of trees, and beyond to a circle of round-
breasted hills. Before I left Allegheny I had found a very precious
thing in that severe room—the companionship there is in the silent
presence of books.
Allegheny did not of course admit women at the start; but the
ferment caused by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment
making it clear that only men were to be regarded as citizens stirred

the Allegheny constituents mightily. Its chief patron, as I have said,
was the Methodist Church. Now the Methodist Church was a militant
reformer. The greatest of its bishops, Matthew Simpson, had backed
Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony and their colleagues at every step.
Leaders among Methodist women had been abolitionists, aggressive
temperance advocates, and now they became militant suffragists.
Their influence began to tell. In 1870, with misgivings in not a few
minds the admission of women was voted. This was the same year
that the University of Michigan opened its doors to women, and two
years before Cornell. In the six years before I entered ten women
had graduated. When I came there were but two seniors, two
juniors, no sophomores. I was a lone freshman in a class of forty
hostile or indifferent boys. The friendly and facetious professor
charged with the care of the “young ladies” put it that I was “Lost in
the Wilderness of Boy.”
From the first I was dimly conscious that I was an invader, that
there was abroad a spirit of masculinity challenging my right to be
there, and there were taboos not to be disregarded. My first
experience was that of which Virginia Woolf speaks so bitterly in “A
Room of One’s Own”—the closing of the college green to her at
Oxbridge. Nearly fifty years before her book was written I was
having at Allegheny the same experience.
The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting.
Between classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only
to hear a horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back
quick.” An imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You
mustn’t go on that side of the walk, only men go there.”
It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be
comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a
beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been
more severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron
stoves, seated with the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene
lamps. In winter (and the winters were long) the snow tracked in
kept the floors wet and cold. Often one wore a muffler in chapel. But
of all that I was unheeding. My pioneer childhood served me well.

Moreover, I realized at the start that I had found what I had come to
college for, direction in the only field in which I was interested—
science. I found it in a way that I doubt if Cornell could have given
me at the moment, shy and immature as I was: the warming and
contagious enthusiasm of a great natural teacher, one who had an
ardent passion for those things which had stirred me and a wide
knowledge which he fed by constant study and travel—Jeremiah
Tingley, the head of Allegheny’s department of natural science.
Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive,
informal. Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen
from many hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis
Agassiz on the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had
planned with enthusiasm for the Penikese Summer School, and for
those privileged to enter who could understand and appreciate it
was an unforgettable experience; certainly it was for Jeremiah
Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in observation and
classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and all her ways.
For both men the material world was but the cover of the spirit.
Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always
brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”
This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my
religious tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that
early stage of development where there must be a definite word by
which to classify oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I
had a creed which I repeated more often than the creed I had
learned in childhood:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find
out with the microscope what God and man are?

Professor Tingley’s method for those he found really interested in
scientific study was to encourage them to look outside the book.
There was where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was
the willful way, that the true way was to know first what was in the
books. Here in Professor Tingley’s classes you were ordered to go
and see for yourself. He used to tell us a story of his first experience
at Penikese. A stone was put before him, a round water-washed
stone, on which he was to report. He looked at the stone, turned it
over. There was nothing to report. “It is not the outside, it is the
inside of things that matters,” said Agassiz. And in the laboratory
that became our watchword: Look inside.
Discovering my interest in the microscope, I was not only allowed,
I was urged to use the magnificent binocular belonging to the
college, was given the free run of the laboratory along with a few as
crazy as myself. Here my most exciting adventure apart from what I
found under the microscope came from actually having my hands on
a “missing link.” Evolution, to which I was clinging determinedly,
could only be established, I realized, by discovering the links. There
was one peculiar to the waters in our valley, the Memopomo
Alleghaniensis, a creature twelve to fifteen inches long with gills and
one lung, able to live in the water or mud as circumstances required.
The mud puppy, as it was appropriately called, was slimy, loathsome,
but I worked over it with awe. Was I not being admitted into the
very workshop of Nature herself—seeing how she did it?
Professor Tingley took his little group of laboratory devotees into
his home circle. He and Mrs. Tingley were housed in a wing of
Bentley Hall—big rooms built for classrooms. They had no children,
and in the years of their study and travel they had gathered about
them things of beauty and interest. The atmosphere of those rooms
was something quite new and wonderful to me. It was my first look
into the intimate social life possible to people interested above all in
ideas, beauty, music, and glad to work hard and live simply to
devote themselves to their cultivation.
And such good talks! Much of it was concerned with fresh
scientific thought, the inventions and discoveries which were stirring

the world. An omnivorous reader of the scientific publications of
Europe and America, Professor Tingley kept us excited, not only by
what had been done but what it might mean. There was the
telephone. I had been in college but a few weeks when my father
asked me to go with him and my brother to the Centennial
Exposition of 1876. President Bugbee, who had made me his special
care for a time—Mrs. Bugbee even taking me into their home until
an appropriate boarding place could be found—was heartily in favor
of my going. I went, and when I returned Professor Tingley’s first
question was, “Did you see the telephone?” I hadn’t even heard of
it. Two exhibits only of that exposition made a deep enough
impression on me to last until today—my first Corot and the Corliss
engine. Professor Tingley was greatly disappointed, and I did not
understand why until a few weeks later he called the student body
together to explain and illustrate the telephone by a homemade
instrument. “You’ll talk to your homes from these rooms one day,” he
told us. “New York will talk to Boston.” He didn’t suggest Chicago.
“Dreamer,” the boys said. “Dreamer,” my father and his Titusville
friends said a little later when an agent of the Bell Associates, the
first company to attempt putting the new invention within reach of
everybody, came to town selling stock. How often I heard it said
later, “If I’d bought that telephone stock!”
Years later I told Alexander Graham Bell of my introduction to the
telephone. “Nobody,” he said, “can estimate what the teachers of
science in colleges and high schools were doing in those days not
only to spread knowledge of the telephone but to stir youth to tackle
the possibilities in electricity.”
What I best remember is not the telephone but Professor Tingley’s
amazing enthusiasm for the telephone. This revelation of
enthusiasm, its power to warm and illuminate was one of the finest
and most lasting of my college experiences. The people I had
known, teachers, preachers, doctors, business men, all went through
their day’s work either with a stubborn, often sullen determination to
do their whole duty, or with an undercurrent of uneasiness, if they
found pleasure in duty. They seemed to me to feel that they were

not really working if they were not demonstrating the Puritan
teaching that labor is a curse. It had never seemed so to me, but I
did not dare gloat over it. And here was a teacher who did gloat
over his job in all its ramifications. Moreover, he did his best to stir
you to share his joy.
But while I looked on what I was learning in the laboratory as
what I had come to college for, while each term stiffened my
ambition to go deeper and deeper into the search for the original
atom, science was not all that interested me. The faculty, if small,
was made up largely of seasoned men with a perspective on life.
There was not only deep seriousness but humor and tolerance, and
since we were so small a college the student was close enough to
discover them, to find out what each man as an individual had to
offer him. As I learned the power of enthusiasm from Jeremiah
Tingley, I learned from another man of that faculty the value of
contempt. Holding the chair of Latin was one of the few able
teachers I have known, George Haskins, father of that sound scholar
of international repute, the late Charles Homer Haskins, at the time
of his death Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Harvard
University. What deep satisfaction his career gave his father, himself
a man of many disappointments!
George Haskins labored, usually in vain, to arouse us to the
choiceness of Latinity, the meaning of Rome’s rise and fall, the
quality of her men, the relation of that life to ours. Professor
Haskins’ contempt for our lack of understanding, for our slack
preparation, was something utterly new to me in human intercourse.
The people I knew with rare exceptions spared one another’s
feelings. I had come to consider that a superior grace; you must be
kind if you lied for it. But here was a man who turned on
indifference, neglect, carelessness with bitter and caustic contempt,
left his victim seared. The sufferers lived to say, some of them at
least: “I deserved it. He was never unjust, never inappreciative of
effort.”
“Cherish your contempts,” Henry James advised me once when he
had drawn from me a confession of the conflict between my natural

dislike of saying anything unpleasant about anybody and the
necessity of being cruel, even brutal, if the work I had undertaken
was to be truthful in fact and logic. “Cherish your contempts,” said
Mr. James, “and strength to your elbow.” If it had not been for
George Haskins I doubt if I should have known what he meant; nor
should I ever have become the steady, rather dogged worker I am.
The contempt for shiftlessness which he inspired in me aroused a
determination to be a good worker. I began to train my mind to go
at its task regularly, keep hours, study whether I liked a thing or not.
I forced myself not to waste time, not to loaf, not to give up before I
finished. If I failed at any point in this discipline I suffered a certain
mental and spiritual malaise, a dissatisfaction with myself hard to
live with.
In spite of my painful efforts to make a regular worker out of
myself, life at college was lightened by my discovery of the Boy.
Incredible as it seems to me now, I had come to college at eighteen
without ever having dared to look fully into the face of any boy of
my age. To be sure, I had from childhood nourished secret passions
for a succession of older individuals whom I never saw except at a
distance, and with whom I never exchanged a word. My brother and
his friends, my father and his friends—these I had always
hobnobbed with; but those who naturally should have been my
companions, I shunned. I was unable to take part in those things
that brought the young people of the day together. I did not dance—
the Methodist discipline forbade it. I was incredibly stupid and
uninterested in games—still am. I had no easy companionable ways,
was too shy to attempt them. I had my delights; the hills which I
ran, the long drives behind our little white horse, the family doings,
the reading of French regularly with my splendid friend Annette
Grumbine, still living, still as she was then a vitalizing influence in
the town and state for all that makes for a higher social life—these
things and my precious evening walks, the full length of Titusville’s
main street, alone or with some girl friend while we talked of things
deepest in our minds.

But in all this there was no boy. I was not long in discovering him
when I reached Allegheny, for the taboos I encountered at the start
soon yielded under the increased number of women, women in
college, in special courses, in the Preparatory Department. They
swept masculine prohibitions out of the way—took possession, made
a different kind of institution of it, less scholastic, gayer, easier-
going. The daily association in the classrooms, the contacts and
appraisements, the mutual interests and intimacies, the continual
procession of college doings which in the nature of things required
that you should have a masculine attendant, soon put me at my
ease. I was learning, learning fast, but the learning carried its pains.
I still had a stiff-necked determination to be free. To avoid
entangling alliances of all kinds had become an obsession with me. I
was slow in laying it aside when I began to take part in the social life
of the college, and because of it I was guilty of one performance
which was properly enough a scandal to the young men.
There were several men’s fraternities in the college; most of the
boys belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of the
fraternities to put their pins on acceptable town and college girls.
You were a Delta girl, or a Gamma girl or a Phi Psi girl. I resented
this effort to tag me. Why should I not have friends in all the
fraternities? And I had; I accumulated four pins and then, one
disastrous morning, went into chapel with the four pins on my coat.
There were a few months after that when, if it had not been for two
or three non-Frat friends, I should have been a social outcast.
I spent four years in Allegheny College. Measured by what I got
instead of by what I did not get and was obliged to learn later, I
regard them as among the most profitable of my life. I find often
that men and women accuse the college of not opening their minds
to life as it is in the world. For a mind sufficiently developed to see
“life as it is” I cannot conceive a more fruitful field than the classics.
If I had been sufficiently mature I could have learned from George
Haskins’ teachings of Cicero and Tacitus and Livy more than I know
today about the ways of men in their personal and their national
relations, more of the causes of war, of the weaknesses of

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