220 ELIZABETH GARY AGASSIZ 



cramped quarters. Before the classes for women had been 

 formed at all, Mr. and Mrs. Oilman had looked with long- 

 ing eyes at one of the older residences of Cambridge, which 

 seemed peculiarly suited to the needs of their contemplated 

 experiment. This was a brick house at the . corner of Gar- 

 den and Mason Streets, standing somewhat back from 

 Garden Street on which it fronted, and just at the point 

 where the road divides to encircle the historic elm under 

 which Washington first took command of the American 

 army. It was a house pleasant in its associations, for 

 among its long line of occupants, since it was built in 

 1806 by Nathaniel Ireland, a well-to-do iron-worker of 

 Boston, there had been many of personal eminence. Its 

 history has been told by Mr. Gilman in the Harvard 

 Graduates 9 Magazine for June, 1896, and need not be re- 

 peated here. Half a century before it assumed consequence 

 for our story, it had been bought by Samuel P. Fay, judge 

 of the Probate Court of Massachusetts, at whose death 

 in 1856 it became the property of his daughter, Miss 

 Maria Fay. During the occupancy of Judge Fay 's family 

 the house had been distinguished for its hospitality, and 

 its doors had opened familiarly to many figures whose 

 names became known in far wider fields Story and 

 Lowell, for example, Longfellow and Holmes, whose 

 father's house had been separated from it by only the 

 width of the Cambridge Common. In 1885 Miss Fay, left 

 alone, and unwilling that another family should occupy 

 the rooms that her own had lived in for fifty years, offered 

 the house for sale to the Society for the Collegiate Instruc- 

 tion of Women for $20,000, and on May 23 of that year 

 the purchase was approved by the Corporation. The ladies 



