The Friday 56 - Week 163

Welcome to Week 163!

Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grab you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post to the Linky at Freda's Voice. Add the post url, not your blog url. It's that simple.

The first book I am going to share with you has more local appeal than anything. In order to assist with research for a middle grade novel I'm writing, I borrowed a copy of History of Mount Holyoke Seminary by Sarah D. (Locke) Stow. This is the higher education institution for women started by Mary Lyon in 1837 that is now called Mount Holyoke College. Stow graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1859.

Page 56 refers to the challenges of promoting this new institution for women in a pamphlet Lyon was designing for potential candidates:

She could not describe its literary standard by comparing it with that of established institutions of the kind everywhere known, as one could do in founding a new college for men. There was no other school to which she could point as an example in this respect when she added: "It is to take the literary standard of Ipswich Seminary, allowing for continual progress, just as that institution has been advancing from year to year. It is to adopt the same high standard of mental discipline and thorough investigation, and the same systematic course of solid studies." An outline of that course was followed by the remark, "That it may accomplish the most good, it is designed for an older class of young ladies, and it is desirable that they should advance in study as far as possible before entering."

I'm also still making my way through I Am Abraham by Jerome Charyn. This is from page 156:

I kept thinking of John Brown and Beecher in his floating pulpit. I could sniff the storm from my window. I watched the swirl of snow until it was time to leave for the Cooper Institute. 

What are you reading today?