Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/743

N. B., where her artistic ability was soon recognized, and she received for an original painting the highest award from the Dominion Exhibition. In 1873 she removed to Halifax, N. S., where her soirees, her musicales, her examination days, and her school exhibitions were of great renown. EMILY WATKINS WAKEFIELD. Reverses compelled her to close her school, and she came to the United States. After two years of successful administration in Patapsco Seminary, Maryland, she was invited to Titusville, Pa., in which place she has been since 1882. Mrs. Wakefield has been a teacher, a singer and a musical director. She has rendered seventeen operas, leading and training the voices of novices and the parts of amateurs, and in addition to all that work she has been the leading spirit in the intellectual advancement of the city, organizing literary clubs and teaching hundreds. Invited to the Chautauqua platform in 1892, she gave a series of lectures that secured her wide reputation and recognition, her success being assured and complete. "The Literature of the Far East." one of her subjects, attests her scholastic research, and the other, "A Day In London," abounded in the same traits and touches that distinguished Cough's performances. She is devoted to her musical and literary labors.

WAKEMAN, Mrs. Antoinette Van Hoesen, journalist, was born in a beautiful valley in Cortland county, N. Y., bounded on either side- by high hemlock-capped hills. Her great-grandfather. Garret Van Hoesen, was a younger son of a prominent family who were the owners of a valuable landed estate in Holland. He, together with another younger brother, Francis, secured a grant of land on the Hudson river from King George III, including the present site of Hudson city. ANTOINETTE VAN HOESEN WAKEMAN. When Antoinette was little more than an infant, her father, who was an invalid, was advised by his physician to go to Minnesota. At that time the Sioux Indians, while no longer legally in possession of the lands of the State, still lingered there, and as a child she was familiar with them and also very fond of them. Her home was on the heights a short distance from the Mississippi river, and when there was no encampment of Indians in the vicinity, her dog and pony were her only companions. She had one brother, then in college. When she was ten years of age, she returned to her birthplace with her father. Her mother had died before she was a year old. She remained in the old home a year. It was during that time, alone in the shadow of the great hills where she first saw light, with the weird hemlocks waving, as it seemed to her then, up in the very sky, she first felt an overwhelming desire for expression, which suddenly became a determination to be a writer. That determination struck root deep in the very source of her being and continued to be an absorbing desire, although for years she put it aside and devoted herself to that which seemed to her to be her duty. Very shortly after that visit to her birthplace, she was sent to a boarding-school, first to the female college in Evanston, Ill., and later to Jennings' Institute in Aurora, Ill., then called Clark Seminary. She was graduated from the latter school with honors. In a few months, against her father's wish and without his knowledge, she was married. She was a child in years and a babe in experience. Her first-born came, and the instincts which motherhood awakens were her teachers. She became bread-winner as well as bread-maker, and for ten years worked as do those without hope. That was the best part of her education, the education of suffering. She learned that her boy, whom she had supported, and for whom she had endured all things, was not her own in the eyes of the law. She learned to know each link in the chain of bondage to which labor must submit, for she was galled by every one of them At last there came a time when, without effort on her own part, she was liberated from all