cial result of what was to be her golden
resource.

But Anna had no thought of doing public speaking as her only means of
earning her living. She continued to look for positions, but without
success. Finally she took a district school in Bucks County, at a
monthly salary of twenty-five dollars. So interested was she in the
"Progressive Friends'" Sunday meetings that she went home every second
week to attend them, and her speeches always won applause from an
audience that had learned to anticipate the impassioned statements of
the bright-eyed girl who was so much younger and so much more intense
than any other speaker.

And now she began to receive invitations to speak in other places. On
her eighteenth birthday she spoke in a small village about thirty
miles out of Philadelphia, when she fairly electrified her hearers by
the force of her arguments and the form in which she presented them.
She continued to teach, although during her summer vacation she made
many speeches in New Jersey. On one occasion she spoke in the open
air, in a beautiful grove where hundreds had come to hear "the girl
orator" give her views on temperance and slavery. Her earnestness and
conviction of the truth of what she said made a profound impression,
and even those who later criticized her speech as being the product of
an immature and superficial mind were held as by a spell while she
spoke, and secretly admired her while they openly ridiculed her
arguments. At another time she was asked to speak at the laying of the
corner-stone of a new Methodist church. The clergymen who gathered
together were inclined to be severe in their judgment of the remarks
of a "slip of a girl." Anna knew that and resolved to speak with more
than usual pathos and power. When she began her address amusement was
evident on the faces of the dignified men looking at her. Gradually
they grew more interested, the silence became intense, and when the
men rose to leave they were subdued, and some of them even were not
ashamed to be seen wiping away tears. One of them introduced himself
to her and with a cordial hand-shake said: "Miss Dickinson, I have
always ridiculed Woman's Rights, but, so help me God, I never shall
again."

But this time the young orator could not help feeling the power she
had to sway great masses of people, and with a thrill of joy she began
to believe that perhaps in this work which she loved above anything
else in the world she would some day find