ard course pursue.

Once more Samaria's people gladly tune their harps and sing
The praises of Jehovah, God, the everlasting King:--
Once more, the voice of gladness sounds where naught but anguish dwelt;
There, once again, the gush of rapture, absent long, is felt!

MRS. ALICE COALE SIMPERS.

Mrs. Alice Coale Simpers was born in the old brick mansion known as
"Traveler's Repose," a short distance south of Harrisville, in the Sixth
district of Cecil county, on the first day of December, 1843.

The Coale family of which Mrs. Simpers is a member, trace their descent
from Sir Philip Blodgett, a distinguished Englishman, who settled in
Baltimore shortly after its foundation, and are related to the Matthews,
Worthingtons, Jewetts, and other leading families of Harford county. On
her mother's side she is related to the Jacksons, Puseys, and other
well-known Friends of Chester county, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington,
Delaware.

Mrs. Simpers' early education was received at Waring's Friends' School,
near the village of Colora, which was kept up by a few families of
Friends in the neighborhood. She also attended the State Normal School
in Baltimore, and qualified herself for teaching in the public schools
of the State, in which she taught for about ten years in Cecil county,
and also in Dorchester county. She also taught school in the State of
Illinois with great acceptability and success.

When Mrs. Simpers was quite young her father removed his family to the
banks of the romantic Octoraro, near Rowlandville, and within less than
two miles of the birth-place of the two poetic Ewings and the late John
Cooley, and the romantic spot where Mrs. Hall lived when she wrote the
poems which are published in this volume. The soul-inspiring beauty of
this romantic region seems to have had the same effect upon her mind as
it had upon the other persons composing the illustrious quintette, of
which she is a distinguished member, and when only seventeen years of
age she began to write poetry. At the solicitation of her friend, E.E.
Ewing, she sent the first poem she published to him, who gave it a place
in _The Cecil Whig_, of which he was the editor and proprietor.

In 1875 Mrs. Simpers began to write for the New York _Mercury_, which
then numbered among its contributors Ned Buntline, Harriet Prescott,
George Marshall, George Arnold, Bayard Taylor, W. Scott Way, and many
other distinguished writers with whom she ranked as an