years old. Besides composing poems for recitation in school, she often wrote songs, both words and music, when she could not find songs suited to various occasions. In 1873 she was married to Clarence G. Allyn, of Nyack, N. Y. After spending several years at Nyack, New London, Conn., and Auburn, N. Y., they moved to Dubuque, Iowa, where they now live. Mrs. Allyn is a prominent member of the Dubuque Ladies' Literary Union, and for eight years she has served as president of the Dubuque Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She has been connected with the local press at times, and she has also won distinction as an artist. She is a member of the Episcopal Church, is broad in her views, while strictly orthodox, and is an ardent admirer of Oriental philosophy. Before her marriage she gained valuable experience as Washington correspondent of the Chicago "Inter-Ocean," a position which she filled for a year, during which time she also wrote numerous articles for the St. Louis "Globe," the New York "World," and before and since then for various New York, Boston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Chicago journals. She is a pointed, incisive writer, and all her work, prose or poetry, has an aim, a central thought. In her own city she has quietly inaugurated many reforms and educational movements, doing the work, not for notoriety, but prompted by her inborn desire to do something towards lifting up humanity.
ALRICH, Mrs. Emma B., journalist, author and educator, born in Cape May county, N. J., 4th April, 1845. She was the first child of fond parents, and no attempt was made to guard against
EMMA B. ALRICH.
precocity. At the age of three years a New Testament was given her as a prize for reading its chapters, and at five years she picked blackberries to buy an arithmetic. At twelve years of age she joined the Baptist Church. At that time she began to write for the county paper. At sixteen she taught the summer school at her home. In 1862 she entered the State Normal School in Trenton, N. J., going out for six months in the middle of the course to earn the money for finishing it. She was graduated in June, 1864, as valedictorian of her class. She began to teach in a summer school on the next Monday morning after her graduation. In 1866 she was married to Levi L. Alrich, who had won laurels as one of Baker's Cavalry, or 71st Pennsylvania Regiment. Her first two years of married life they spent in Philadelphia, Pa. In 1876 the Centennial opened up new possibilities and Mr. and Mrs. Alrich moved to the West and settled in Cawker City, Kans. There she again entered the school-room, was the first woman in Mitchell county to take the highest grade certificate, and the only woman who has been superintendent of the city schools. She was a warm supporter of teachers' meetings, church social gatherings, a public library and a woman's club. In 1883 her husband's failing health compelled a change in business. He bought the "Free Press," and changed its name to the "Public Record." All the work of the office has been done by their own family, and each can do every part of it. Besides her journalistic work, she served two years on the board of teachers' examiners. She was one of the forty who organized the National Woman's Relief Corps, one of the three who founded the Woman's Hesperian Library Club, and was the founder of the Kansas Woman's Press Association. Her busy life leaves her but little time for purely literary work.
AMES, Mrs. Eleanor M., author, born in 1830. She now lives in Brooklyn. N. Y. She has written a number of books, under the pen-name "Eleanor Kirk" designed to assist young writers, and she publishes a magazine entitled "Eleanor Kirk's Idea," for the same purpose. Her works include "Up Broadway, and its Sequel" (New York, 1870), "Periodicals that Pay Contributors" (Brooklyn), "Information for Authors" (Brooklyn, 1888); and as editor, "Henry Ward Beecher as a Humorist" (New York, 1887), and "The Beecher Book of Days" (New York, 1886).
AMES, Mrs. Fanny B., industrial reformer, born in Canandaigua, N. Y., 14th June, 1840. In her childhood she was taken with her father's family to Ohio, where she was for some time a student in Antioch College, under the presidency of Horace Mann. Her first experience in practical work was gained in military hospitals during the war. For five years she was a teacher in the public schools in Cincinnati. She was married in 1863 to the Rev. Charles G. Ames, and during his ministry in Philadelphia she engaged in the work of organized charity, was president of the Children's Aid Society, traveled widely in Pennsylvania, assisting in the organization of county branches of that society, visiting almshouses, and getting up the provisions by which dependent children were removed from almshouses and placed in private families under the supervision of local committees of women. Under State authority she was for five years one of the visitors of public institutions, with power to inspect and report to the Board of State Charities. She thus became familiar with the methods, merits and abuses of those institutions, her knowledge of which not only qualified her to prepare the reports of the Philadelphia Board of Visitors, but led her into wide and careful study of the causes of poverty and dependence, quickening her natural sympathy with the struggling classes, at the same time elevating her estimate of the social service rendered by wisely-used capital and fairly-managed industries. She was for two years president of the
