220 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
cramped quarters. Before the classes for women had been 
formed at all, Mr. and Mrs. Gilman 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’ 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 
