for any of her sympathetic help, either in his sports or in his growing
student life. With this renewed determination she went into the house to
write her letter to her brother at Northampton.
She was just finishing it when her husband came in from his weekly
meeting with the city fathers. She told him all her plan, which he
heartily endorsed, and practically helped by taking out his purse and
giving her a generous sum of money for the trip, saying, "I wish, my
dear, that I could go too, but I cannot leave my business this season of
the year. But I am only too glad that I can make money enough for you
and Reuben to go. I know of no better way to invest it for the future of
our boy, God bless him!
"Ah!" replied Mrs. Tracy, her face all aglow with the joy of having her
own thought so fully met, "would that more fathers thought so! but while
some think only of a bank account, and the great majority think nothing
of any account at all, only the few know the need of a child's mind
_digesting_ money, so to speak, as it goes along."
In a few days the arrangements were completed and Mrs. Tracy and her son
left their home in Salem for Northampton. Reuben quietly enjoyed the
scenery all the way from Boston to Springfield. In the forty minutes'
ride from Springfield to Northampton Mrs. Tracy had a delightful
opportunity, which she well used, to show her boy the winding course of
a river,--the beautiful Connecticut--as they followed it first on one
side and then on the other. When Reuben spied the house on Mount Holyoke
he realized then that he saw his first mountain. On making inquiries
about the mountain with a house on it, on the other side of the river,
the conductor told him that that was Mount Nonotuck, a peak of the Mount
Tom range, which was nine hundred and fifty feet high. He also told him
that Nonotuck was the old Indian name for Northampton, which was just
then coming in sight.
On arriving at the station uncle Edward met them with his carriage to
convey them to his home on Round Hill. On their way there they passed
the fine building of Smith College, which particularly pleased Mrs.
Tracy and caused her to say, partly to herself, "Happy, happy girls to
have such privileges of college life." "What," said Reuben, "girls go to
college like boys? how funny!" When, after a moment or two of seeming
abstraction, he said: "That is what papa meant the other day when he
said that girls were as good as boys and could learn
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