MBS. PERCY V. PENNYBACKER 377 son that we are **put here to do what service we can, for honor and not for hire, * * and she has bent herself to the task. Existence to her has not been a business to be transacted in an indifferent manner, but it has meant a great opportunity as well as, a serious responsibility. Her first appearance at a Biennial Convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs marked an epoch both for the organization and in her own life. This was in Los Angeles in 1902. As president of the Texas Federation the report she gave there of what the club women of her state had accomplished, her remarkable knowledge of parUamentary procedure, and an indescrib- able something characterized by Thomas Hardy as **that strange, suasive pull of personality — all these combined to fix her in the consciousness of the delegates, more than one of whom then prophesied that she was destined to become president of the national body. Bom in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1861, of parents who were also natives of the Old Dominion, Anna J. H. Pennybacker's antecedents are all Southern. The first sentence from her lips reveals this fact, and there is something peculiarly fas- cinating to a Northerner in listening to the English language spoken by an educated native of the South. Her father, the Rev. John B. Hardwicke, like most ministers of the gospel of an earlier day, was prone to change his domicile frequently, and so we find the family, after leaving Virginia in 1864, re- siding successively in North Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas, and finally Texas. Mrs. Hardwicke was a woman of ability, possessing unusual charm of manner. She lived to rejoice ^ in the distinction that came to her daughter, passing away in 1913. There is ample evidence that both Dr. Hardwicke, who died many years earlier, and his wife were persons of exceptional force of character. It was the E^sas sojourn that probably determined the bent of our subject's career. Graduating at the Leavenworth Classical High School in 1878, when she was barely seventeen, she had already selected teaching as her vocation. This was chiefly due to the influence of the principal of the school, to whom Mrs. Pennybacker has more than once acknowledged
