How lovingly she watched the work go on! When the interior was under way, how carefully she considered each detail of closets, shelves, and general arrangements for comfort and convenience! When the question of equipment became urgent, how she worked to create an interest that should express itself in gifts of bedroom furnishings, curtains, crockery, and kitchen-ware, as well as books, desks, chairs, and laboratory material! All sorts and conditions of contributions and donations were welcomed. One was reminded of the way pioneer Harvard was at first supported by gifts of "a cow or a sheep, corn or salt, a piece of cloth or of silver plate." Four months before the day set for the opening, not a third of the necessary furnishing had come in. "Everything that is done for us now," cried Miss Lyon, "seems like giving bread to the hungry and cold water to the thirsty!" On the eighth of November, 1837, the day that Mount Holyoke opened its door, all was excitement in South Hadley. Stages and private carriages had for two days been arriving with road-weary, but eager, young women. The sound of hammers greeted their ears. It appeared that all the men, young and old, of the countryside had been pressed into service. Some were tacking down carpet or matting, others were carrying trunks, unloading furniture, and putting up beds. Miss Lyon seemed to be everywhere, greeting each new-comer with a word that showed that she already knew her as an individual, putting the shy and homesick girls to work, taking a cup of tea to one who was overtired from her journey, and directing the placing of furniture and the unpacking of supplies. It might well have seemed to those first arrivals that they must live through a period of preparation before a reluctant beginning of regular work could be achieved, but in the midst of all the noise of house-settling and the fever of uncompleted entrance examinations the opening bell sounded on schedule time and classes began at once. What seemed, at first glance, hopeless confusion became ordered and stimulating activity through the generalship and inspiration of one woman whose watchword was: "Do the best you can _now_. Do not lose one golden opportunity for doing by merely getting ready to do something. Always remember that what ought to be done can be done." This spirit of assured power--the will to do--became the spirit of those who worked with her, and was in time recognized as "the Mount Holyoke spirit." "I can see Miss Lyon now as vividly as if it were only yesterday that I arrived, tired, hungry, and fearful, into the strange new world of the seminary," said a white-haired grandmother, her spectacles growing misty as she looked back across the sixty-odd years that separated her from the experiences that she was recalling. "Tell me what you remember most about her," urged her vivacious granddaughter, a Mount Holyoke freshman, home for her Christmas vacation. "Was she really such a wonder as they all say?"