mily Wolcott has scheduled five demanding courses for the second semester, signing up again for Earle W. Dow in history and Warren Florer in German, switching from Robert Mark Wenley to a class in aesthetics with George Rebec, and taking a course in rhetoric with Fred Newton Scott and one in Shakespeare with Isaac Newton Demmon.

The semester had just begun when her sister Kate died on February 8, and Wolcott went home for a week. On February 28 she resumed her letters to her mother and sister Clara round-robin accounts about her experiences in Ann Arbor:

Some one told Dr. Florer why I was out, and he never said a world about my making up my German. I took my seat in Dr. Scott's English again and breathed a sigh of content. He is a professor as is a professor. So is Dr. Rebec ... in Aesthetics Tuesday, a Mr. Perrith read a paper on the Iliad ... it was the most scholarly and remarkable thing. I learned more from it, and what followed, about the Greeks than I ever knew before. At the close of it Dr. Rebec carried on a kind of Socratic conversation with him and with other members of the class. I think Prof. Scott will have to move over on the pedestal I have made for him and make room for Dr. Rebec.

Wolcott, who thought it "pleasanter to write books than read them," found Scott's assignments in rhetoric "better than studying," even when he required three analytical essays a week. Sometimes his assignments called for distinguishing "between athletics and sports, rhythm and meter, culture and education, art and humor, ethics and morals, or style or manner; or the defining of poetry, or science, or politics or money." Sometimes the class composed two-minute speeches on "novels and their classes." There were exercises, too, that focused upon principles of exposition, and involved analyzing an essay such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Carlyle's Laugh" for theme, structure and the "office" of each sentence.

In the first week of March, Scott exhibited a bust of Emerson for his class to analyze and asked for papers on the expressions on the face as viewed from the front and the sides. "He does think up very interesting exercises," Wolcott decided. The next week he asked what Tennyson's Ulysses meant when he said "I am a part of all that I have met." After reading the essays, Scott told his class that they "quite disappointed" him.

Much more to Wolcott's liking was Scott's announcement in mid-March that the class would have two weeks to "discover, state and illustrate the principle of development of Gothic architecture by studying the photographs of a series of cathedrals: Caen, Senlis, Notre Dame (Paris), Amiens and Rheims." He posted the pictures in the English room in West Hall where 10 to 12 students were about them constantly. Some were the "cocksure kind," merely stopping by for a close look; some frankly said, "This is awful!" and some were the "grafters" who hung around to learn what they could from others instead of "studying it out."

On March 29, Emily Wolcott wrote her weekly letter home between the periods of courses on Italian history, Shakespeare as a man, and German subordinate clauses. She had read Henry IV, Parts, 1 and 2, and also Henry V for Professor Demmon, and an Icelandic Edda, in translation, for Aesthetics, to learn the source of The Nibelungenlied. For Fred Newton Scott she was attempting to reduce Walter Bagehot's essay on Shakespeare to a thesis sentence, with the emphasis in the sentence indicating what was stressed in the essay.

Despite such demanding assignments she found time to hear Woodrow Wilson, the new president of Princeton, lecture on patriotism. She agreed with his "sentiments," but seemed even more impressed by his appearance: "His face is nearly twelve inches long ... and looks as if it had been chopped out with an ax." She also went to hear Martin L. D'Ooge, professor of Greek language and literature, lecture at the Philological Society on dating the foundations of the Parthenon. There was spirited discussion afterwards about the origin of marks revealed by the old excavations—were they caused by Persian destruction or by early workmen burning scaffolding? "It appeared to be a matter of life and death," said Wolcott, amazed yet appreciative of such "an exhibition of a pure zeal for knowledge."

Warm weather in late March was the catalyst for ritual hair-cutting raids by the sophomores against the freshmen, initiated by the cutting of the freshman toastmaster's hair:

Then it becomes quite general. There are squads of them [sophomores], from ten to fifty at a time, waiting for certain ones [freshmen] to come from their boarding houses or rooms—if they can't get away by running, they submit gracefully, as there is no resisting, when the squads nab one at a time, and they stop right on the street and shear off their hair; it all happens in the evening. Some of the nicest-looking boys now look like prize-fighters and murderers out of the police gazette. By mistake, they cut a freshman law student, which is not to be done. The laws were to hold a meeting this afternoon to decide whether they should go on the warpath. If they do, there will be but little hair left on the two lower classes of the "Lits." I suppose this may look foolish, but it is really quite exciting. The more that get cut, the more are ready "to go on the war-path." Tonight [March 23] there are a great many out, just after dinner.

Within the week, the hair-cutting season was over because "Prexy [President Angell] put his broad and gentle foot upon it."

On April 11 Wolcott went home to Ohio by train, gladly leaving her books to "dig around outdoors" on the farm in Tallmadge. But on May 5 she was a student again, reading for a "whopper" of a paper on Macbeth in a room in the General Library set aside for students taking seminars.

"You will be glad to know," she told her mother and sister Clara on May 10, "[that] I have finished my MacBeth paper, and read it. It was 40 pages and more of a thesis paper, and it was real good too. I had three compliments on it; you may think that was not enough, but good papers are such a common thing here; the place is full of smart people. I don't know whether I can ever read it to you. Everything you write here is 'property of the University.' You are allowed to keep copies, of course, but there is never time to make them."

In the same letter she described the recent Senior Swing-Out. In anticipation of Commencement on June 14, all the prospective graduates "wore caps and gowns and President Angell made an address. Every word of it was the very best and wisest and most appropriate that could possibly be, as his words always are. Then they marched around the campus between long rows and crowds of people."

Meanwhile, Wolcott was trying to find someone to fit the dress she wanted to wear to the May Festival. On May 10, with the first of the concerts just four days away, she wrote home about her disappointing encounters with Ann Arbor dressmakers. The first two were too busy with festival work, so she tried a third:

Her assistant, a little crippled oldish person, came down to answer the bell, sewing as she came, and took me up to the room. It was like a warehouse for bareness, the floor was literally covered with thousands of different kinds of scraps. I have heard since that they do a tremendous amount of the most beautiful work and have time to sweep only once a year. The head person sat with her back to me, facing the window, her feet up on the rung of her chair, bent over sewing with all her might. "I can't stop," she said without turning around, "to talk to you. I've got dresses to go out on every train this morning. I can't talk to you." I fled, wondering how she could live the day out.

Wolcott never did get her dress altered, but she attended all five of the concerts. A few weeks later she reported on the mysterious disappearance of a student who left "letters in his room from some secret society in Texas that he should not live after the 20th, his hat with a bullet hole in it & blood on it on the sidewalk; which blood turned out to be wood-dye, and the student turned out to owe a good many bills and to be engaged to two girls."

That last week in May a circus came to Ann Arbor and Wolcott was on the scene:

The entire University was lined up on the campus to see the parade .... The crowds of boys waved their hats to the lady chariot drivers, and stopped the first wagon and taught them the Michigan yell. A crowd of 2[00] or 300 boys spent the evening in the side show tent .... If a trick was too slow they called "faster" till it was done right; when the Strong Woman's exhibitor announced that she would lift a dumbbell weighing 158 lbs., they all shouted that that was too heavy for a lady, and threw the great football player, [Willie] Heston, over the ropes into where she was—he lifted the dumbbell and found it weighed 20 lbs.

After such excitement came the reality of finishing the semester. Final examinations began on June 5 and ended on June 11. None was scheduled for Shakespeare or Aesthetics, the courses requiring the papers Wolcott called "whoppers," the first on Macbeth and the second on Wordsworth. She was also completing her required reading on the Book of Job, Dante's and Milton's poetry and "the fall of the Nibelungens." She made preparations, too, for returning in the fall, consulting professors about courses and following a lead on a room on Thompson Court. She was back home in Tallmadge on June 13.

Edgar L. McCormick '50 PhD of Kent, Ohio, is a professor emeritus of English at Kent State University. He thanks Elizabeth A. Yeargin of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Georgia Haugh of the U-M Clements Library, and Karen L. Jania of the U-M Bentley Historical Library for assisting him in this series on Emily Wolcott's two years at Michigan. We will complete the series in our next issue.