Page:Women of distinction.djvu/345

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.
273

the paper and often contributed to its columns. I'or the past two years she has become one of its essentials in the office, and she devotes her whole time to the work. She was among the first Afro-American graduates from our high school, and subsequently took a normal course at the Fenton Normal School. She also spent several years teaching in the South until newspaper allurements became more tempting. Her idea of a newspaper is that it should be metropolitan in character, deal in live issues, and be reliable.

Her career is worthy of consideration in this book.

CHAPTER LXXI.

MRS. RACHEL M. WASHINGTON.

This is one of the many ladies of whom Boston may well be proud. Graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music, she has ever been active as an instructor to the young with whom she came in contact, as well as an earnest searcher after knowledge in the line of her chosen profession. It is said that she has possibly done more to cultivate a love and admiration for music among the prominent citizens of Boston than any other one person.

The following lines are taken from a letter written by her to a friend:

As I read the lives of the great composers, and think of their sacred devotion to the art dearer to them than their own lives, I feel anxious for the time to come in our history when a child like Mozart shall be born with soul full of bright melodies; or a Beethoven, with his depth and tenderness of feeling; or a Handel, lifting us above this earth until