Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/712

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meetings evenings, and during each day visiting from house to house, reading the Bible and praying with the families. Many were converted. A church was organized and a church edifice was built. In April she went to Belmont, N. H., and held a protracted meeting in the Christian Church. More than one-hundred-fifty professed conversion. That summer she held meetings in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, seeing many converted. In August Mr. Taylor returned from the South, and on 3rd September, 1869, they were married. For several years they held meetings together in the New England States, often in summer using a large tent for a church. In 1875-76 Mrs. Taylor taught school in Atlantic City, N. J., preaching Sundays and having charge of a Sunday-school of about two-hundred members. From 1877 to 1887 her home was in Harrison, Me., from where she and her husband went out to labor. Mr. Taylor was pastor of a church in Kennebunk, Me., for two years, Mrs. Taylor assisting him by preaching half the time. She spent the years 1881-82 in Boston, editing the "Little Christian," a child's paper. While there, she became deeply interested in homeless children, and when she returned to Maine in the spring of 1883, she took six little ones with her, for whom she obtained good homes. That work was continued for many years, and more than forty children are indebted to her for homes in Christian families. Some of those little ones she kept with her for years, and one she adopted. That work was done almost entirely at her own expense. Although much of the time in delicate health and doing her own housework, she has always made it a rule to spend a short time each day in study, which included the sciences, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French and German. In 1889 Mr. Taylor accepted the pastorate of a church in Bridgeton. Me., and there they have since resided. Mrs. Taylor is engaged in preaching, lecturing, writing, holding children's meetings, organizing Sunday-schools and doing missionary work. As an example of a self-educated woman succeeding under adverse circumstances, Mrs. Taylor stands in the foremost rank.


TELFORD, Mrs. Mary Jewett, army nurse, church and temperance worker, born in Seneca, N. Y.. March 18th, 1839. She was the fifth of ten children. Her father. Dr. Lester Jewett, was a physician and surgeon. Her mother, Hannah Southwick, was a Quaker of the Cassandra Southwick family. Her early life was spent on a farm. MARY JEWETT TELFORD. Her parents were uncompromising temperance people and shared fully in the abolition principles of the Quakers. Anti-slavery and temperance lecturers always found a refuge and a welcome at their fireside, and round that hearth there was much intelligent discussion of the live questions of the day. The "underground railroad" ran right through the farm, there being only one station between it and the Canadian line. Her earliest recollection is of a runaway slave; she stood clinging to her father's knees, watching the chattel as he examined a pistol, while the hired man was hitching up the team to convey him to the next station. "You would not shoot?" said her father. "I wouldn't be taken," was the reply. The conflicting passions on that slave's face indelibly impressed the mind of the child and doubtless hail its influence in making her life work the relief of the oppressed and suffering. In 1846 the family moved to Lima, Mich. Delicate health prevented regular attendance in school, but home instruction and the attrition and nutrition derived from an intelligent home life made her an acceptable district school teacher at the age of fourteen years. In 1859 she received the offer of a position as teacher of French and music in an academy in Morganfield, Ky. The girl replied that she was an abolitionist. The offer was repeated and she accepted. When she returned home the next year she left many cherished friends and kept up a warm correspondence until it was hushed by the gun which was fired on Fort Sumter. On the organization of the Sanitary Commission in the early summer of 1861, Miss Jewett applied to Miss Dix for a position as army nurse. She received only evasive answers and did not then know that the wise provision concerning age excluded her. She was at that time president of a girls' Soldier's Friends Society. A younger brother, who had enlisted, died in Nashville, Tenn., in December, 1862, in a hospital where there were one-thousand sick and wounded soldiers, and not one woman's care. She renewed her efforts to be accepted as a nurse in the western department They were wisely shy of strangers, and she received the reply that they "had all the women they needed." She told no one of that letter, but throwing it into the grate made of it a "whole burnt offering to her righteous wrath." That day was Saturday. On Monday, with her parents' consent (this was the third child they had given for freedom), she started for Nashville, determined to find or make a way into the hospitals. On her arrival she called on Miss Chase at Hospital No. 8 as a visitor. Some one had given an organ to the hospital, but there was no one who could play. Discovering that her visitor was a musician, Miss Chase invited her to remain a few days and give the soldiers some music. She at once took up the work of the house, and soon the surgeon, Dr. Otterson, inquired for her papers. "How would you like," said he, "to have me send and get you a commission?" With a bounding heart, she handed him the letter from Governor Blair and other Michigan friends, and the coveted