Salinas Junior College - La Reata Yearbook (Salinas, CA)

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past year. Mr. Alcott ' s conversations, or rather monologues, on the Isness of the Here entranced me. I recall one saying of his that seemed to me deeply significant: When the mind is ising, it is thinging things, surely descriptive of the creative spirit. So I went to the Concord School of Philosophy that summer and walked to the first meeting with Louisa May Alcott herself and later spent a pleasant hour at their home with Mr, Alcott and his daughter, Mrs. Pratt, the Meg of the story. Beth lies in the beautiful Sleepy Hollow cemetery, where rest also Thoreau and Hawthorne. Walden Pond can be seen as one enters the town, and in Concord flows the Concord River with the rude bridge that arched the flood. The rustic building that sheltered the school was next to the old Orchard House of the Little Women, and Emerson ' s white dwelling was not far away. Interesting village. Concord, and interesting people! There was Frank Sanborn, who had been jailed for his aboHtionist activities and by whom I was very proud to be remembered when I met him again five years later at Cornell ; his son, a young boy perhaps fifteen, who attended the school and discussed with me the philosophy of Kant; Miss Bates, heroic soul, whose cheerful bearing of many infirmities can never be forgotten ; her protege, Thomas Whitney Surette, a musical prodigy of nineteen, who has since done notable work for American music ; and a child whose name I never knew, but whose kittens were OEDIPUS TYBJVN- NUS and OEPIDUS COLONEUS. The children lisped in numbers in Concord, and even the infants were litterati! There was lovely Miss Emily Howland, a summer visitor from New York state, who Uved afterward to be well over a hundred and who preserved to the end the gentle sym- pathy and loving wisdom that keep her name a blessed memory. And towering over all even as he towers above all his countrymen, Emerson! He did not come regularly to the shcool, and he did not speak at all, but when he sat before us on the platform with his saintly ascetic face, over which now and again drifted a smile of heavenly sweetness and radiance, our hearts lifted, and we realized the presence of transcendant loveliness of spirit. One day when he was leaving, he stumbled and might have fallen if I had not been there and steadied his steps. That is the high water mark of my life! I, even I, have actually touched Ralph Waldo Emerson! Late that same year I went to Washington with Matilda Joslyn Gage to attend a Suffrage Convention, which was deeply interesting. Rachel Foster Avery was there, charming and beautifully gowned, with whom I remembered to have played in childhood, when she and her mother visited mine ; Belva Lockwood, one of the first women lawyers; Dr. Mary Walker, pioneer woman physician and rebel against the trammels of feminine Continued on Division Page Book IV