many of the
vicissitudes of fickle fortune and carried the traditions of a glorious
past up into the realities of a prosperous and useful present more
successfully than has Fay House, the present home of Radcliffe College,
Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day dates back
nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous
merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare
when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in
1806, erected on the highroad to Watertown, the first brick house in the
vicinity.

To Mr. Ireland did not come the good fortune of living in the fine
dwelling his ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his
prospects were ruined by the Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to
leave the work of construction on his house unfinished and allow the
place to pass, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of others. But the
house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss,
for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard
instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college associates
and of the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes
was among those who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.

The next name of importance to be connected with Fay House was that of
Edward Everett, who lived here for a time. Later Sophia Willard Dana,
granddaughter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minister to Russia, kept
a boarding and day school for young ladies in the house. Among her
pupils were the sisters of James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing, the
first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and members of the
Higginson, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. Lowell himself, and Edmund
Dana, attended here for a term as a special privilege. Sophia Dana was
married in the house, August 22, 1827, by the father of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, to Mr. George Ripley, with whom she afterward took an active
part in the Brook Farm Colony, of which we are to hear again a bit
later in this series. After Miss Dana's marriage, her school was carried
on largely by Miss Elizabeth McKean--the daughter of the Doctor Joseph
McKean already referred to--a young woman who soon became the wife of
Doctor Joseph Worcester, the compiler of the dictionary.

Delightful reminiscences of Fay House have been furnished us by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, who, as a boy, was often in and out of