Thursday, June 5, 1919

Beautiful bright hot day. 90 degrees in Shade. Some breeze. To college library in A.M. Greek exam in P.M. Down town on wheel in evening. Saw Hayes. Nettie Bacon here from India. Loads of curios. To bed 11 P.M. Thankful.

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When Stanford says he went downtown on the "wheel," I can only guess he means a bicycle. It might have been his humorous way of saying cycle, which has a Greek origin (kyklos, meaning "circle, wheel" [from Online Etymology Dictionary]), thus a sly reference to the Greek exam he had taken earlier that day.

Nettie Almira Bacon was a missionary for the Methodist church, more specifically, for the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Starting in 1913, Nettie did missionary work until at least the mid-1930s. In fact, in June of 1919, she had recently returned from her first six years abroad. She had been studying at the Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow, India, and then perhaps working there as a teacher once her studies were complete. (Here is a Wikipedia article about the school: ITC, and one from a Christian publication: Thoburn.)  Below is a picture of Isabella Thoburn, the school's founder, with her most famous pupil, Lilavati Singh, taken in 1900.

Isabella Thoburn with Lilavati Singh

In the 1910 census Nettie Bacon was listed as living in Schenectady, working as a high school teacher. By 1920, however, she was living in New York City and planning to leave again for India in July of that year.

It's not clear what Stanford means by here when he says Nettie was "here from India," but it's possible she was a friend of the family and was visiting the Clossons at their home. She may have met them in the Methodist church, or she may have been Stanford's high school teacher, or both.