The Eagle’s Nest—Beware! High up in the leafy branches Frances would sit for hours, making up bits of verse or editing the “Fort City” newspaper. On Sunday afternoons the children would wander with their mother in the orchard while she talked to them about the beauty that God had created. They realized that God was very near. Frances was quite young when she first heard from her parents of the unhappiness that drink brings. With the other children she signed a pledge written in the big family Bible, and ending: “So here we pledge perpetual hate To all that can intoxicate.” For some years Mrs. Willard took charge of the children’s lessons, but later a young woman from the East came to teach them and some of their little neighbors. No child was ever more hungry for knowledge than little Frances Willard. She often declared that she wanted to learn everything. There came a day when Frances was very happy and excited. A little schoolhouse had been built in the woods about a mile away. It was so small and brown and plain that she called it “a sort of big ground-nut,” but it was a real schoolhouse, with a Yale graduate for a teacher. Later on Frances and Mary went away to college. They attended Milwaukee Female College, and then Northwestern Female College at Evanston, Illinois, from which they were graduated. At these two schools energetic, high-spirited Frances was a leader, both in and out of the classroom. Frances Willard was the same earnest, hungry-minded, determined girl when she became a teacher that she had been as a student. She began to teach in her own “brown-nut” schoolhouse during her first college vacation. After her graduation from college she spent a number of years in the teaching profession. During this time she was at the head of several important schools. She concluded her teaching career as Dean of the Woman’s College in Northwestern University. About this time many people were becoming alarmed at the amount of drunkenness throughout the United States. They were distressed by the misery caused by drink. In the small towns in the Middle West, women often marched through the streets singing, praying, and begging saloon keepers to give up their business. In Chicago a band of women, marching to the City Council to ask to have the Sunday closing law enforced, were rudely treated by the mob. Frances Willard had never forgotten the pledge that she had signed in the family Bible. The insults to these women aroused her fighting spirit. She felt that she must help.