The Story of Wellesley | Page 6

service.
But we must go back to the days before one stone was laid upon
another, if we are to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story. It was
in 1855, the year after his marriage, that Mr. Durant bought land in
Wellesley village, then a part of Needham, and planned to make the
place his summer home. Every one who knew him speaks of his
passion for beauty, and he gave that passion free play when he chose,
all unwittingly, the future site for his college. There is no fairer region
around Boston than this wooded, hilly country near Natick--"the place
of hills"--with its little lakes, its tranquil, winding river, its hallowed
memories of John Eliot and his Christian Indian chieftains, Waban and

Pegan, its treasured literary associations with Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Chief Waban gave his name, "Wind" or "Breath", to the college lake;
on Pegan Hill, from which so many Wellesley girls have looked out
over the blue distances of Massachusetts, Chief Pegan's efficient and
time-saving squaw used to knit his stockings without heels, because
"He handsome foot, and he shapes it hisself"; and Natick is the Old
Town of Mrs. Stowe's "Old Town Folks."
In those first years after they began to spend their summers at
Wellesley, the family lived in a brown house near what is now the
college greenhouse, but Mr. Durant meant to build his new house on
the hill above the lake, or on the site of Stone Hall, and to found a great
estate for his little son. From time to time he bought more land; he laid
out avenues and planted them with trees; and then, the little boy for
whom all this joy and beauty were destined fell ill of diphtheria and
died, July 3, 1863, after a short illness.
The effect upon the grief-stricken father was startling, and to many who
knew him and more who did not, it was incomprehensible. In the quaint
phraseology of one of his contemporaries, he had "avoided the snares
of infidelity" hitherto, but his religion had been of a conventional type.
During the child's illness he underwent an old-fashioned religious
conversion. The miracle has happened before, to greater men, and the
world has always looked askance. Boston in 1863, and later, was no
exception.
Mr. Durant's career as a lawyer had been brilliant and worldly; he had
rarely lost a case. In an article on "Anglo-American Memories" which
appeared in the New York Tribune in 1909, he is described as having
"a powerful head, chiseled features, black hair, which he wore rather
long, an olive complexion, and eyes which flashed the lightnings of
wrath and scorn and irony; then suddenly the soft rays of sweetness and
persuasion for the jury. He could coax, intimidate, terrify; and his
questions cut like knives." The author of "Bench and Bar in
Massachusetts", who was in college with him, says of him: "During the
five years of his practice at the Middlesex Bar he underwent such an
initiation into the profession as no other county could furnish.

Shrewdness, energy, resource, strong nerves and mental muscles were
needed to ward off the blows which the trained gladiators of this bar
were accustomed to inflict. With the lessons learned at the Middlesex
Bar he removed to Boston in 1847, where he became associated with
the Honorable Joseph Bell, the brother-in-law of Rufus Choate, and
began a career almost phenomenal in its success. His management of
cases in court was artistic. So well taken were the preliminary steps, so
deeply laid was the foundation, so complete and comprehensive was
the preparation of evidence and so adroitly was it brought out, so
carefully studied and understood were the characters of jurors,--with
their whims and fancies and prejudices,--that he won verdict after
verdict in the face of the ablest opponents and placed himself by
general consent at the head of the jury lawyers of the Suffolk Bar."
Adjectives less ambiguous and more uncomplimentary than "shrewd"
were also applied to him, and his manner of dominating his juries did
not always call forth praise from his contemporaries. In one of the
newspaper obituaries at the time of his death it is admitted that he had
been "charged with resorting to tricks unbecoming the dignity of a
lawyer," but the writer adds that it is an open question if some, or
indeed all of them were not legitimate enough, and might not have been
paralleled by the practices of some of the ablest of British and Irish
barristers. Both in law and in business--for he had important
commercial interests--he had prospered. He was rich and a man of the
world. Boston, although critical, had not found it unnatural that he
should make himself talked about in his conduct of jury trials; but the
conspicuousness of his