The rare privilege of seeing and hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson was also ours. He read his lecture and fumbled with his papers, meantime casting apprehensive glances to the faint far-away lights on the gallery side. "I am a student," he began slowly, "and a lover of light." The hint was speedily taken and silver candelabrum with blazing candles from the lady principal's parlor was quickly forthcoming. In those days we knew the trustees very well, and their paternal interest in the venturesome experiment of the higher education of women was something akin to the Founder's. Fourteen of the twenty-eight on the original Board were residents of Poughkeepsie; seven of them had professions, seven were simply close business friends, including his two nephews, John Guy Vassar and Matthew Vassar, Jr. Some of these men were rather hard to persuade that so large a gift of money invested in this way was not in a perilous cause, but each lived to witness the beginning of Vassar's grand success and the Founder's triumph. Once when there was a question of extension of the Christmas vacation and the Prudential Committee--as they were then called--had met to consider its advisability, one of them opposed the measure saying, "Pretty soon our patrons will be complaining that they don't get the worth of their money. We don't give them much over forty weeks of school now." Not one member of this first Board is living, the first break coming with the death in March, '69, of James Harper, senior member of the firm of Harper & Brothers. Dr. Elias Magoon stands out vividly in my portrait gallery. Dear, kind, eccentric man! He looked, and we all thought him in his enthusiasm, mildly crazy, but we came to appreciate him and delight in his ardor. The college bought from him his whole private art collection of pictures, folios, books, armor, etc., to stock the Vassar gallery. The books--chiefly editions de luxe--were later transferred to the library proper, and it made the librarian sore at heart to discover how much Dr. Magoon had apparently read, pencil in hand, and how much patient work in eradication must result in consequence, impossible to accomplish wholly, as traces existing to-day testify. Dr. Magoon was a lover and student of nature as well as of art. He was a frequent visitor at the college in the spring, coming from his Philadelphia home "just to get up at five o'clock in the morning for a tramp over Sunset Hill or around the lake to hear and see the birds." My table in the dining-room was near that of the Faculty, and it was a pleasure to see him come in to breakfast with face aglow from his walk, and to mark the interest and brightness he carried with him.