Where should the children go? The case of the girl was quickly settled by her mother. Years ago this good lady had her own dreams of a college education and knew just where she wanted to go. Denied the privilege of going herself, she nominated her daughter as her substitute. That settled it—there was no primary or referendum or special election. There seemed to me something of poetic realization in this setting of the only bud into the long-desired and long impossible tree of knowledge. As for the boy—the case was different. I would like to send at least one child back to my old college, and I think a couple of the smaller ones will go later. I know better than to try to crowd boys into associations which are not congenial. If your boy has intelligence enough to justify his going to college let him use his intelligence to decide something of what he wants. I advised the boy to select one of the smaller colleges of high reputation and keep away from the great universities. He made what I call a good choice—an institution of high character, lonely location and with one great statesman graduate who stands up in history like a great lighthouse, to show the glory of public life and the dangerous rock of his own private habits.
Well, Mother and I traveled close to 900 miles up and down through New England on this trip of planning in the garden of education. I could write a book on the memories and anticipations which filled the minds of this Hope Farm quartette. As the train rushed up the country, winding through villages and climbing hills, we took on groups of bright-faced boys on their way to college. Before we reached the end of our journey the train was crowded with them. There was one sour-faced old fellow on the train who viewed those boys with no benevolent eye.
“A lazy, careless lot. I’d put them all at work!”
The old man was wrong—he was sour. Even the evidence of hope and faith in the future which those bright-eyed boys brought could not sweeten him. Here were the thinkers and dreamers and workers of the future. Underneath their fun and careless hope they carried the prayers of their mothers and the poorly expressed dreams of fathers who saw in those boys the one chance to carry on a life work. While the old man scowled on I found myself quoting from “Snow Bound,” Whittier’s picture of the college boy who taught the winter school: