Page:The Afro-American Press.djvu/378

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
370
THE AFRO-AMERICAN PRESS.

had the largest number to teach; and one day, as she stood at her work, with tears in her eyes, occasioned by some misunderstanding about her share of the monthly receipts, she said: "The sun will yet shine in at my door." A few hours later the pastor put in her hands a letter from Dr. William J. Simmons, president of the State University, Louisville, Ky., offering to defray her expenses through the American Baptist Woman's Home Society of Boston. This was October 15, 1881. He had seen her before, while on a trip securing students, and said to her: "Would you like to go to Boston to school?" She replied: "Yes, so much." He was impressed with her amiable, meek, Christian spirit, coupled with her reputation for goodness, of which he had heard from various citizens.

She entered the State University November 28, 1881, and became a member of the third normal class. Her decorum was such, that the president testified, on the night of her graduation from the normal course, in a class of thirteen, as he gave her the Albert Mack valedictorian's medal, that she had never been spoken to once, by way of discipline, during her entire course. He afterwards, in writing of his graduates, said of her; "As a student, she was prompt to obey and always ready to recite. She has a good intellect and well developed moral faculties, and is very refined, sensitive, benevolent and sympathetic in her nature, and well adapted to the work of a Christian missionary."

On entering the University, she was almost immediately chosen by the president as student-teacher and dining-room matron, and during the year of her graduation she taught five classes a day. The students honored her with the presidency of the Athenæum and the Young Men and Women's Christian Association. Though she worked all the time, yet in her graduating year she entered the examination and gained the highest mark, 95 per cent, and obtained the