Lockwood-0068_04

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218 MY EFFORTS T0 BECOME A LAWYER.

the liberality of the trustees of that Methodist school opened its doors
to two women. Here was an opportunity that I could not afford to
lose, and which seemed likely to gratify the ambitions of my youth.
So, without consulting my friends at home, I offered myself, at the
conclusion of the first term in the seminary, to the College Board for
examination and matriculation in the Freshman class.

The preceptress in the seminary tried to dissuade me by declaring
that in her opinion the seminary course was much more desirable and
lady-like, while the President of the college did not smile upon this at-
tempted innovation upon the time-honored prerogatives of man. Raising
-his spectacles, he gravely asked me if I expected to complete the course.
He evidently did not fully comprehend, good man as he was, the nature
of the timber of which the young woman who thea confronted him
was made. :

For the years succeeding, I devoted myself unremittingly to the
labors of the course, and graduated with honor June 27, 1857. There
was at this time no Law Department connected with the institution, or
I should undoubtedly have asked admission thereto, But a law class
was opened in the village by a young law professor, and a goodly num-
ber of college and seminary students, myself among the number, com-
menced attendance thereon. Naturally enough, the class was frowned
upon by the faculties of both seminary and college, as an intrusion
upon their rights; but this was the beginning of my study of the law.

Before my graduation, however, I had been elected, over several
competitors, preceptress of the Lockport Union School, then incorpo-
rated as an academy,—the election to take effect immediately on my
leaving the college. This position had been offered to me without
solicitation, and almost against my wishes, as I had formed other plans;
but, upon the advice of President Cummings, ] accepted it.

At the end of the first session I visited my parents in Hlinois, and
brought back with me my little daughter Lura, now six years of age,
and my youngest sister Inverno, to put them in school and have them
under my charge. The latter graduated in the school three years later,
while Lura was prepared for the senior department. Four years of
unremitting toil, of earnest work, were spent in this school, then num-
bering from six to seven hundred young men and women. As a teacher,
I did not content myself with the knowledge that I had already acquired,
but strove each day to gather up some new thoughts in each of the
branches pursued by my respective classes. I was also very active in
the Schoo] Associations, Town, County, and State, which I often en-
livened with an original essay, and almost invariably joined in the
debates that were sure to be started at each meeting, on the most ap-
proved methods of teaching.

It was at one of the meetings of the State Association that I first
met Susan B. Anthony, who, like myself, was in early life a teacher in
the public’ schools of the State of New York. It is true that avhile in
college I had slipped away one evening, without the knowledge of the
faculty, to hear Susan deliver one of her progressive lectures on the
“ wrongs of woman.” She was at this time just commencing to argue
the necessity fur the enlargement of the sphere of labor for woman,