Woman of the Century/Alice O. Darling

ALICE O. DARLING. DARLING, Miss Alice O., poet, was born near Hanover, N. H. She is the daughter of one of the California pioneer gold-hunters of 1849. Her father was a farmer's son, and his youth was spent on a farm in Croydon, N. H., where he was born His quest for gold in California was successful, and in 1855 he returned to New Hampshire and settled on a farm in the town of Lebanon. There he was married to Mary Ann Seavey. Several generations back his ancestry contained a drop of Indian blood, and to that fact Miss Darling attributes many of her mental and physical characteristics. She has an Indian's love for the fields and forests, a deep and lasting remembrance of a kindness or an injury, and a decided distaste for crowds and great cities. Unlike most New Englanders, she would rather go round than through Boston, whose architectural beauties are to her "only impressive and oppressive." Notwithstanding the regular and arduous toil of farm life. Miss Darling has found time to do considerable literary work of no mean order. She published her first poems when she was seventeen years old. When she was twenty-two years old, she wrote for the Newport, N. H., "Argus and Spectator," and later for the Boston "Traveller," the Boston "Record," the Boston "Globe," the Boston "Transcript," the Buffalo "Express," the Hanover "Gazette," and "Good Housekeeping."