![Transcription Center logo](/themes/custom/tc_theme/assets/image/logo.png)
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
Most of us I fancy squirm mentally at looking back at ourselves in our adolescence. Certainly the picture I produced in the first few months at college now makes me redden. It was the first time I had ever been among a picked lot of students and with my country school preparation that was not over good, and my awe and lack of self-confidence my appearance to say the least was not prepossessing. I had one green chambray dress [[?]], which I wore continuously from the time college opened in mid September till after Thanksgiving. My mother nightly washed it out and ironed it the next morning before I left on the early train. My mother sold enough chestnuts that we had picked up in our woods, to buy for $5 a long cloak, of [[?]] brown & black stripes, which even then we humorously referrred to as the [["Rathan"?]]. Yet my father, was not an extremely poor man, nor was he miserly, but my mother and I never asked for a penny more than was absolutely necessary. We felt extremely that we were women and dependents. I wonder if nowadays college students go through the same conflict as I, at least, did 20 odd years ago. Faced with the necessity of earning my living after college, and with the ? ? of poverty all about me, nevertheless I was with many misgivings enjoying old English, Greek, Philosophy and English Poetry. My early [[half served?]] plan, had been to [[fit?]] myself as a teacher of biology, and I had registered for all the zoologoy and botany, courses open to Freshmen. The professor, a ---drial school teacher, ? ? "The Prince of Pain", was his ? slowly with the ? of having their students transcribe faithfully word for word all he said. The laboratory work was a farce. [[Did not have even?]] a to ?. The botany class was even worse. One morning I brought in a [[cram?]] plant that would have [[Thaddeues?]]