come under our care. We have fur
nished hot lunches, clothed 169 child-
ren, had the eyes and ears and teeth
of 700 black and white in this neigh-
borhood attended to, taken people to
hospitals and sanitariums, made cloth-
es for the new babies, taken food and
fuel to those who needed it, and with
the help of neighbors and parents the
school has financed this work. Mrs
Seipp gave her services and has taught
the girls how to sew and knit and they
have done wonderful work. The whole
school has given plays, Horse Shows
and entertainments of all kinds to
make money. We have ninety famil-
ies to say nothing of those we help
through the schools. Several kind par-
ents have given medicines and warm
underwear. Many Alumnae have sent
us old clothes, all of which is most
helpful and duly appreciated. We are
rager and anxious to carry on this
good work which not only helps the
poor, but teaches the Foxcroft giris
what a large part of the world nceds
their help and what good they can do
when they really care.
KAY METCALF.
AGAINST THE WINTER OF
FORGETFULNESS
(A Tribute to Miss Ida Applezate)
The average person of any thought-
fulness or character feels, I think, a
spiritual kinship with some of the im-
mortals of history, a fundamental
comprehension of their contribution
to life. A Louis Pasteur or a Jane
Adams calls to mind such human
earthy words as strength, perserver-
ance, kindliness, honesty. Their am-
bitions seem almost a reiteration of
one’s own—more profound, more lu-
cid, more fruitful, but still one’s own.
They strove hard to attain an end, suf-
fered, hoped, were disillusioned, and
learned by experience. One could al-
most divide the world into those to
whom suffering means a spiritual re-
birth and those to whom it often
means destruction.
In the second half belong the fragile,
beatific beings, the Mozarts, the
Keats’, the Debussys, who seem to
flutter down to earth in perfect com-
pleteness and touch to flowering what-
ever comes their way. Their quality
is so elusive that concrete words on a
printed page can only hint at their di-
vinity. Dr. Lin Yulang has paid grace-
ful tribute to a country seemingly
composed of people of this way of life
in his charming book on China. In
that country it seems quite unremark-
able to be an expert calligrapher or a
poet of lotus-flowers and pheasants
and torrential waterfalls or even
merely a discriminating drinker of
rare teas.
In the West such fragile souls are
rare and difficult to nurture. They are
stifled and stuffed out by the com-
monplaces of everyday existence,—by
soot and Fords and Democratic con-
ventions and “noses-for-news”. They
are not born, for the most part, to live
through such Rabelaisian clamor and
to survive. They die very young, or
they turn to the Orient to seek pro-
tection amid fields of bamboo and si-
lent, distant mountains, or else they
shade away into oblivion.
A realization of the very ephemeral
nature of such characters I hope will
help to excuse the lack of cohesion
and completeness in this tribute to a
rare soul of the gentle way of life—a
oentle soul but with the determination
to carry on untouched where others
might have faltered.
In the death of Miss Ida, Foxcroft
lost an unusual and vital force, a per-
sonality strong enough to keep its
own serene integrity, alike with the
refined and with the vulgar, with the
aentle and the uncouth, to say with
Emerson, “I am I, you are you.”
When an unusual person, one whom
we have felt to be bigger in some
mystical way than ourselves, whom
we have ceased to wonder at but
whose presence we have come to re-