s suddenly gave up their
candidate and nominated me for orator.

This was not at all what I wanted, and I immediately declined to serve.
We girls then nominated the young man who had been first choice of our
brother society, but he haughtily refused to accept the compliment.
The reunion was only a fortnight away, and the programme had not
been printed, so now the president took the situation in hand and
peremptorily ordered me to accept the nomination or be suspended. This
was a wholly unexpected boomerang. I had wished to make a good fight for
equal rights for the girls, and to impress the boys with the fact of our
existence as a society; but I had not desired to set the entire student
body by the ears nor to be forced to prepare and deliver an oration
at the eleventh hour. Moreover, I had no suitable gown to wear on so
important an occasion. One of my classmates, however, secretly wrote to
my sister, describing my blushing honors and explaining my need, and my
family rallied to the call. My father bought the material, and my
mother and Mary paid for the making of the gown. It was a white
alpaca creation, trimmed with satin, and the consciousness that it
was extremely becoming sustained me greatly during the mental agony of
preparing and delivering my oration. To my family that oration was the
redeeming episode of my early career. For the moment it almost made them
forget my crime of preaching.

My original fund of eighteen dollars was now supplemented by the
proceeds of a series of lectures I gave on temperance. The temperance
women were not yet organized, but they had their speakers, and I was
occasionally paid five dollars to hold forth for an hour or two in the
little country school-houses of our region. As a licensed preacher I
had no tuition fees to pay at college; but my board, in the home of the
president and his wife, was costing me four dollars a week, and this was
the limit of my expenses, as I did my own laundry-work. During my first
college year the amount I paid for amusement was exactly fifty cents;
that went for a lecture. The mental strain of the whole experience was
rather severe, for I never knew how much I would be able to earn; and
I was beginning to feel the effects of this when Christmas came and
brought with it a gift of ninety-two dollars, which Miss Foot had
collected among my Big Rapids friends. That, with what I could earn,
carried me through the year.

The following spring our brother Ja