She wrote Sarah Bagley on Christmas Day about the weekly alumni meetings at Clark Oliver’s, where the students met “to talk science and benefit by arguing and discussing it” and where she looked in on them occasionally “to cheer their labors.”³⁸ On Christmas Eve they had had a surprise party and presented her with a landscape painted by Clark Oliver and an elegant silver pitcher from the class, with Kennedy acting as spokesman. For the moment her cup of happiness was full.

She herself was in the habit of giving little gifts impulsively to those around her. To young Susie Felt who lived near-by and loved her with all the ardent idealism of a fifteen-year-old she gave a ring, a book, a photograph; to George Barry a copy of Whittier’s Snow Bound, Tennyson’s Poems, and a history of the Civil War. But mostly she gave Bibles. In the little Bible she presented to “Putney” Bancroft for writing the best interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis she wrote on the flyleaf, “With all thy gettings get understanding.”³⁹ And in the small Bible bound in purple velvet that she later gave to George Allen she wrote a verse admonishing him to keep it for the giver’s sake but read it for his own.

These are small details, but, as she wrote in the autograph album of her nephew George Baker when he visited her at the end of 1870 after completing his studies at the New Hampshire Conference Seminary: