results in rowing a part of the stroke in the air, so as to produce the appearance of giving a tremendous catch. This catch means, when rightly understood, getting only such a firm hold at the very beginning of the stroke as can be got by supporting the main part of the weight of the body on the heels against the stretcher, with the arms like straps from the shoulders to the oar handles, the blades at the same instant being dropped so as to be covered in the water. This amount of force can be carried through the first two thirds of the stroke, but anything more vigorous than this sort of a catch does positive harm. The fourth help is rowing on an even keel. There is one way of teaching this trimming of the boat, which many good coaches have used to great advantage, with almost immediate good results. I have seen crews immensely improved in two quarter-hours' practice in this, two days in succession.

Now while I have in mind several other criticisms on Harvard rowing of late years, I yet so feel the importance of this "falling together," and I have seen the means of accomplishing it so neglected, that I refrain from saying anything else for fear of distracting attention from what I have already written.

If every Harvard crew in the future will thus pull together, no matter what its other probable defects may be, we shall have no more such disgraceful defeats, no more ten or twelve lengths in the rear. Our races will at least be close, with occasional victories made the more frequent the more the other though minor points are also improved upon.

R. H. Dana, "74.

FAY HOUSE OF RADCLIFFE COLLEGE.

THE estate on which Fay House of Radcliffe College stands, at the corner of Garden and Mason Streets, was in 1643 the property of Henry Prentice, who came to Cambridge from Sudbury in that year or earlier. He was an early emigrant from England. The family was a large one in Cambridge. There were few dwellings in the vicinity of the Common in those days, and it was itself a dreary waste as late as the opening of the present century. Henry Prentice was a "husbandman," husbandman," as were many

others of his generation in the village. The estate remained in his family for more than one hundred and sixty years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was owned by Henry Prentice, who sold it to his son John, a graduate of Harvard College of the Class of 1766. John studied law, and six years after graduation removed to Londonderry, N. H., where he afterwards held important offices. He was a member of the House of Representatives for thirteen years; was speaker of the House for eight years, and finally was appointed judge of the Superior Court in 1798, an appointment which he declined. In 1806, two years before his death, John Prentice sold his Cambridge estate.

There lived in Boston at that time, one Nathaniel Ireland, whose occupation was that of making the iron work used in ships, and as the business of shipbuilding seems to have been prosperous, he accumulated an estate which he thought was sufficient to enable him, with prudence, to have a residence in the country. He therefore invested $1,200 of his fortune in the acre and a quarter of land that we are considering, and erected the building which still stands. In some respects it possessed greater dignity than any other dwelling in the little village of but a few hundred inhabitants. It was of brick, among many scattered houses of wood; it had tower-like bays from the ground to its flat roof, and it looked substantial; but it had no better foundation than Mr. Ireland's fortune. It had, in fact, no true foundation at all. The outline of the building had been traced in shallow trenches, which were filled with loose stones, and upon them the walls were built. It is a wonder that they still stand upright at the venerable age of ninety. The entrance was not on Garden Street, as it was when the "Annex" purchased it, but upon Mason Street, then Watertown Road.

Jefferson's embargo ruined the shipbuilding business, and with it the fortune of Mr. Nathaniel Ireland crumbled. Mr. Ireland remains almost a myth himself, and so far as records and tradition go, he was seen but once more. It is related by Mr. John Holmes (the " J. H." of Mr. Lowell's Letters) that as he was going through Cambridgeport some years later, he saw a bent figure making its difficult way along the street. Mr. Holmes, with his accustomed friendliness, asked the old man who he was and whither he was trying to go. He found that he was our Mr. Ireland, and telling

him that he was in no condition to walk to his home, which he said was near the Mount Auburn gate, he started him off in a chaise. As the chaise rolls up Main Street, Mr. Ireland disappears from view. With Sally, his wife, he lived in an old house of wood that stood at the apex between Brattle and Mount Auburn Streets, opposite the cemetery gate, and thence he made his final exit. His estate was left in difficulty. There were mortgages. In the spring of 1809 one of these was foreclosed by Solomon Stanwood, and in the autumn of the following year William McKean obtained an interest in the estate, which in time led to the transfer of the title to Professor Joseph McKean, though this was not completely effected until the close of 1814, when the interest of Ireland was entirely extinguished.

The coming of the McKeans constitutes a new era, for thereafter the inmates of the building were as dignified as it was itself. Dr. McKean had been invited to Harvard College as professor of Mathematics in 1806, but he had declined. A second call came in 1808, this time to the chair of Rhetoric and Oratory, as successor of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, and he accepted the offer. The misfortunes of Mr. Ireland left the comparatively new building at his disposal. Dr. McKean was father of the late Mrs. Charles Folsom, and of Mrs. Joseph Worcester, widow of the lexicographer. He died in 1818, leaving his estate to his widow and minor children. Doubtless the house was a centre of delightful social life during the ownership of Professor McKean. Dr. Holmes said to me that he had enjoyed many an agreeable evening there in his youth. A few years ago as he entered the attractive parlor with me, he went to the front window, and screening his eyes from the sunlight with his hand, he looked across the Common as though he expected that the old gambrel-roofed house might again take its ancient position under the elms on the opposite side of the open space.

After the McKeans passed away, the house had many tenants. It appears to have been owned in succession by John Rynex, Daniel Silsbee, Samuel Downer, and Luke Baldwin, Jr., before 1821. During this period Edward Everett lived in the house (in 1820-21), before his marriage, when he removed to Craigie House. In 1827, Downer and Baldwin assigned the estate to "Josiah Gardner, of Dorchester, gentleman," who sold it Feb

ruary 14, 1831, to Henry Higginson, of Boston, trustee under the will of Stephen Higginson, also of Boston, who had died in 1828. In October, 1831, Henry Higginson transferred the property to Stephen Higginson, then steward of Harvard College, son of the previous Stephen, and father of Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, now of Cambridge. Stephen Higginson, Jr., held the title to the estate less than a year, for he transferred it to Dr. Francis J. Higginson, May 10, 1832. Dr. Higginson owned the place for three years, and in June, 1835, he sold it to Samuel P. P. Fay, judge of the Probate Court, who had for a long time lived on Austin Street, near Inman Street. Stephen Higginson, Jr., died in 1834; Judge Fay followed him in 1856, and after his death his heirs united in a deed of the property to his daughter, Maria Denny Fay, who, in 1885 sold it to "The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women," usually called the “Harvard Annex," the predecessor of Radcliffe College. Thus it remained in the possession of Judge Fay and his daughter for fifty years, a longer period than any other family except the first, had held it. Judge Fay was a member of the Class of 1798, with Judge Story and Dr. Wm. Ellery Channing.

After the time at which Mr. Everett left the house, it was occupied by Francis Dana, son of the distinguished Chief Justice of Massachusetts, who lived on Dana Hill, and brother of the poet, Richard Henry Dana. Francis Dana married Sophia, daughter of President Willard, and among his children was one very highly educated girl, named for her mother, Sophia Willard, who kept a school for girls in the house. In 1827 she married Dr. George Ripley, who had for some years been a student in Harvard College and the Divinity School. He was first in the Class of 1823, with "John P. Robinson, he," of Lowell's verse, and other bright minds. Mrs. Ripley followed her husband, as his efficient inciter and helper, through his fourteen years as pastor of the Purchase Street Church, in Boston, through his difficult experience at Brook Farm, and died after he had conquered success in New York. Meantime she taught school, both at Brook Farm and in Flatbush, where the first home was made after leaving that interesting settlement of theorists in Roxbury. Her husband's church in Boston was sold to the Roman Catholics, and when Mrs. Ripley died in 1859, she had held the faith of that

body for nearly a dozen years, and she was buried from the building, as a Catholic, in which as a Unitarian she had been married.

Subsequently, in 1832, the house was occupied by Daniel Davis, whose long term of office as solicitor-general of Massachusetts had just closed, a gentleman of the old school, who wore the powdered wig of authority, and inspired awe in the youthful mind. He was father of Rear-Admiral Charles Henry Davis, and of Mrs. Wm. Minot, and he had two other daughters, known for the hospitality and social activity for which they made the house, then called "Castle Corner," famous. In "Some Memories of Fay House," which Colonel Higginson gave to the students of the Annex in 1894, he said that his aunt, Mrs. Frank Channing, mother of the eloquent William H. Channing, also lived in the house. It was Colonel Higginson's father who changed the entrance from the Mason Street side to the Garden Street front, and became responsible for the narrow and steep flight of stairs which he erected in the stead of an ornamental circular flight which was in the beginning in the room now called the Conversation Room, a flight that was wearily familiar to all members of the "Annex" during its early years.

Judge Fay did not at once occupy the house after his purchase, but rented it for two years to the Hon. Richard Sullivan of Boston, a classmate for whom he had named his eldest son. The present Richard Sullivan, also of Boston, likewise occupied the house for four or five years after 1858, during the absence of the Fays in Europe. It was this last Mr. Sullivan who brought from Maine the white birch-tree that is still standing in the rear of the auditorium. I may say, in passing, that when that addition was planned I made a special agreement that the birch-tree should not be harmed. Imagine my chagrin, almost as soon as the workmen had begun to dig the cellar, when I was called from a meeting of the Executive Committee to be told that it would be impossible to follow the plans without cutting down the tree. My insistence on the terms of the agreement was followed by the discovery that there was a way out of the dilemma, and the tree was saved.

Judge Fay is described by Colonel Higginson as a picturesque type, like the English sporting gentleman of the illustrated papers, who might be seen riding out of his stable of a fine day in search of the game that was to be found in the vicinity of the