the college opened its doors to three hundred
and fourteen students. More than two hundred other applicants
for admission had been refused for lack of room. We can imagine
the excitement of the fortunate three hundred and fourteen, driving
up to the college in family groups,--for their fathers and mothers,
and sometimes their grandparents or their aunts came with them.
They went up Washington Street, "the long way", past the little
Gothic Lodge, and up the avenue between the rows of young elms
and purple beeches. There was a herd of Jersey cows grazing in
the meadow that day, and there is a tradition that the first student
entered the college by walking over a narrow plank, as the steps
up to the front door were not yet in place; but the story, though
pleasantly symbolical, does not square with the well-known energy
and impatience of the founder.

The students were received on their arrival by the president,
Miss Ada L. Howard, in the reception room. They were then shown
to their rooms by teachers. The majority of the rooms were in
suites, a study and bedroom or bedrooms for two, three, and in
a few suites, four girls. There were almost no single rooms in
those days, even for the teachers. With a few exceptions, every
bedroom and every study had a large window opening outdoors.
There were carpets on the floors, and bookshelves in the studies,
and the black walnut furniture was simple in design. As one alumna
writes: "The wooden bedsteads with their wooden slats, of vivid
memory, the wardrobes, so much more hospitable than the two hooks
on the door, which Matthew Vassar vouchsafed to his protegees,
the high, commodious bureaus, with their 'scant' glass of fashion,
are all endeared to us by long association, and by our straining
endeavors to rearrange them in our rooms, without the help of man."

When the student had showed her room to her anxious relatives,
on that first day, she came down to the room that was then the
president's office, but later became the office of the registrar.
There she found Miss Sarah P. Eastman, who, for the first six
years of the college life, was teacher of history and director of
domestic work. Later, with her sister, Miss Julia A. Eastman, she
became one of the founders of Dana Hall, the preparatory school
in Wellesley village. An alumna of the class of '80 who evidently
had dreaded this much-heralded domestic work, writes that Miss
Eastman's personality robbed it of its horr