"I learned twenty years ago not to get out of patience," she once said to some one who marveled at the unwearied good-humor with which she met the most exasperating circumstances.
First enlisting the assistance of a few earnest men to serve as trustees and promoters of the cause, she, herself, traveled from town to town, from village to village, and from house to house, telling over and over again the story of the Mount Holyoke to be, and what it was to mean to the daughters of New England. For the site in South Hadley, Massachusetts, had been early selected, and the name of the neighboring height, overlooking the Connecticut River, chosen by the girl who was born in the hills and who believed that it was good to climb.
"I wander about without a home," she wrote to her mother, "and scarcely know one week where I shall be the next."
All of her journeying was by stage, for at that time the only railroad in New England was the one, not yet completed, connecting Boston with Worcester and Lowell. To those who feared that even her robust health and radiant spirit could not long endure the strain of such a life, she said: "Our personal comforts are delightful, but not essential. Mount Holyoke means more than meat and sleep. Had I a thousand lives, I would sacrifice them all in suffering and hardship for its sake."
During these years Miss Lyon abundantly proved that the pioneer does not live by bread alone. Only by the vision of what his struggles will mean to those who come after to profit by his labors is his zeal fed. It seemed at the time when Mount Holyoke was only a dream of what might be, and in the anxious days of breaking ground which followed, that Miss Lyon's faith that difficulties are only opportunities in disguise was tried to the utmost. Just when her enthusiasm was arousing in the frugal, thrifty New Englanders a desire to give, out of their slender savings, a great financial panic swept over the country.
Miss Lyon's friends shook their heads. "You will have to wait for better times," they said. "It is impossible to go on with the undertaking now."
"When a thing ought to be done, it cannot be impossible," replied Miss Lyon. "Now is the only word that belongs to us; with the afterwhile we have nothing to do."
In that spirit she went on, and in that spirit girls who had been her pupils gave of their little stipends earned by teaching, and the mothers of girls gave of the money earned by selling eggs and braiding palm-leaf hats.
"Don't think any gift too small," said Miss Lyon. "I want the twenties and the fifties, but the dollars and the half-dollars, with prayer, go a long way."
So Mount Holyoke was built on faith and prayer and the gifts of the many who believed that the time cried out for a means of educating girls who longed for a better training. One hard-working farmer with five sons to educate gave a hundred dollars. "I have no daughters of my own," he said, "but I want to help give the daughters of America the chance they should have along with the boys." Two delicate gentlewomen who had lost their little property in the panic, earned with their own hands the money they had pledged to the college.