At this time there were about sixty students in the school, only one of them, Helen Sumner, being of college rank. In the senior preparatory class which I joined, there were about a dozen. They formed the unique class that for seven years was the most advanced in the school—think how dangerous to heads the experience of being seniors for seven years! This class graduated from Pomona college in 1894 and numbered among its members Dr. George Sumner and Dr. David P. Barrows.
The year I joined them I found each member of the class had read Caesar during the summer vacation, taking examination and passing in September in order that the class might go on with the required amount of Cicero in the first semester and Vergil in the second, and so make college the next fall, with four years of Latin done, and done thoroughly in two years. With Vergil at nine in the morning (after submitting to ten minutes of spelling drill on any word Miss Spalding might find in Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas), and again at four in the afternoon we read rapidly enough to get the charm of the poem as well as the dry bones of vocabulary and construction. All the work of the year was strenuous but full of delight—the happiest year of all my school life.
The primitive conditions of a pioneer school only added zest to the students, but for those teachers who had come out of the East the barn-like hotel in the desert, the lack of comforts and conveniences, even of sufficient food, and the meager salaries possible meant hardship.
