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The Normal College of New York City
By William H. Rideing, 1877
The Procession into the Chapel
At ten minutes to nine o'clock one morning last November the writer took seats with the president on the chapel platform of the Normal College. The vast hail was then empty and reverberant; the day outside was cloudy, and the long Gothic windows let in a gray twilight which gave the interior an ecclesiastic solemnity, the effect being heightened by the gilded pipes of a large organ in the gallery. On the platform with us were the professors and tutors, both ladies and gentlemen. The body of the hall was black with seats, and the gallery on both sides of the organ offered farther accommodations. Precisely at five minutes to nine — not a second earlier or later — a lady seated at the piano in front of the platform began to play a lively march, and at that very moment the doors leading into a wide corridor, with class-rooms on each side, were thrown open, and what seemed to be an endless procession of girls came in, the patter of their feet sounding like the
dripping of a fountain, and harmonizing
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