It may as well be said here that these students were sent from Manila to prepare for Harvard in Dr. Ripley’s school in Boston; a school which was of the first repute in the early forties. The Doctor transferred it with several of the teachers to West Roxbury, where it became the nucleus of the Brook Farm school. The Ford girls, with their aunt, Miss Russell, the Barlow boys and their mother, and the Manila youths were, I believe, among those migrating from the Boston school.
We all liked the young Spaniards very much, and I have ever since liked the people of their nationality I have met at home and abroad. They can teach us good manners every day in the week; but they have one peculiarity that must strike the average American as certainly rather strange. This is their common and familiar use of words and names which we regard as sacred and hardly to be spoken outside of the meeting-house. As an example, it may be allowable, at this late day to mention without giving family names, that one of our students was baptized Jesus Mary, and another by the same rite was designated Joseph Holy Spirit.
Before bedtime the snowstorm had risen to the height of a terrific tempest, the heaviest and hardest of the winter, and what the New England winter can do when it tries can only be known by experience, as no description can convey any adequate idea of the fierce blasts, the drive of hard-frozen snow and the terrible cold forced straight through clothes and flesh and bones by the piercing spears and pounding hammers of the Northeast gale fiends. Three days and three nights the raiding powers of the arctics raged about us and blockaded all but the hardiest and strongest of us in the close quarters of the Hive. To venture out of the house was to risk life and limb. No one was allowed to run such risks alone, as, in case of a fall, the chances would be against getting up again without help, but parties of twos and threes of the young men went to the barns to look after the cattle or up to the Eyrie, the Cottage and Pilgrim Hall to see that all was right and to bring down a sled-load of bedding for the shut-ins. In their services, the vegetarians matched themselves against the “cannibals” as they disdainfully called those who were still in bonds to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but I do not believe there was beef enough eaten on the place to warrant any comparisons being made, and, at any rate, they all came out alike, pretty much exhausted.