Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/206

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REPRESENTATIVE WOMEN OF NEW ENGLAND
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but her energies required a more active life, and for several years she travelled through the Middle States, representing a Chicago firm, a cereal food house. Her salary, seventy-five dollars a month for the first two months, was then increased to three thousand dollars a year and expenses. In 1894 she married Arthur Putnam Ayling, a native of Boston, then a glass manufacturer in Milwaukee, Wis. She was elected treasurer of the company, the Northern Glass Works, and had practical charge of the office and sales department. In 1898, her health failing, the Aylings moved to a delightful country house in Bridgewater, Mass., where the rest and outdoor life proved restorative. Later, when her husband^s business interests took him to the remote Southwest, Mrs. Ayling assumed the business management of a new Boston publication, the Brown Book, which in less than two years achieved a most remarkable success. She is also the president of the Automatic Addressing Machine Company, and has interests in various other enterprises.

Personally Mrs. Ayling is a woman of rather slight physique, far too slight for the stress the mind would impose upon it; but her indomitable will carries her through tasks that might well deter many men. Her rather quizzical gray eyes have an almost clairvoyant power in reading those with whom she comes in contact. Her mind rapidly grasps the salient points of any proposition, ignoring unimportant details, and her deductions are seldom in error. She places her objective points clearly, and attains them by very direct methods, possessing strong executive ability. She systematizes the work of her assistants, and inspires intense loyalty in those about her. Mrs. Ayling is a member of the New England Women's Press Club, and was a charter member of the Ousamequin Club of Bridgewater.


MERCY A. BAILEY, art teacher, Boston, was born in the town of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her parents were the Rev. Stephen Bailey, a native of Portsmouth, N.H., and his wife, Mrs. Sally Whitman Bailey, daughter of Dr. Jonas and Mercy (Goodspeed) Whitman, of Barnstable. Miss Bailey's maternal grandfather, Dr. Jonas Whitman (Yale Coll., 1772), was a descendant in the fifth generation of JohnWhitman, an early settler of Weymouth, Mass., who, through his daughter Sarah, was an ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln. The Whitman-Lincoln line is thus shown: Sarah^ Whitman, daughter of John,1 married about 1653 Abraham Jones; and their daughter, Sarah Jones, married Mordecai2 Lincoln, of Hingham, from whom the line continued through Mordecai,3 born in 1686, who removed to New Jersey and later to Pennsylvania; John,4 who settled in Virginia; Abraham,5 who re- moved to Kentucky; to Thomas,6 father of Abraham,7 the sixteenth President of the United States.

Miss Bailey was educated in private schools in Boston and at Wheaton Seminary, in Norton, Mass. She remembers no time when she was not busy with pencil and brush. Even as a tiny child she thus reproduced the familiar objects about her. Her parents, recognizing her talent, wisely resolved to have it properly developed; and accordingly she received the benefit of the best instruction from both native and foreign teachers, a part of her student days being spent in London and Paris.

She had been a painstaking student for several years when she accepted her first position as a teacher of drawing in the public schools of Dorchester, Mass. W^hen Mr. Walter Smith came to Boston and started the movement for introducing the teaching of drawing in the public and evening schools of the city, there was a rapidly increasing demand for well-trained teachers. This resulted in the founding of the Normal Art School, in which Miss Bailey has been a popular and esteemed teacher for twenty years, teaching light and shade drawing from animal forms and still life in oil and water-colors. She has been a diligent worker and student in her chosen field all her life, continuing to draw and paint during the years when teaching claimed the greater part of her time. Art has held first place with her always, society, dress, vacations, becoming matters of secondary importance. She has exhibited in Boston, Philadelphia, and Western cities, her subjects being heads, animals, and