James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

Isn't this an interesting dilemma to find one's self in?--to be exhibited whether we will or no! One who has arrived at years of discretion, surely, in our free land, to have no chance of a choice, whether to remain incog., or be set on high for all the daws to peck at! “But to this it seems we have come at last,” and, in my extremity, if I may choose nothing else, I surely shall snatch at the chance to say by whom this most undesirable service shall be performed, and I gladly submit to you.

I have done so little to justify my years, that I might shrink from such a sketch as you propose, with better reason than could influence many of our sex. But lest you should think my humility affectation, I frankly avow that I was born in Canandaigua, N. Y., in January, 1820, if you consider date and birthplace important to the sketch, of neither “poor or pious parents,” although cultivated, conscientious persons. My father's name was Orson Seymour, a banker, my mother's name was Caroline M. Clark. I was married in 1840, at Auburn, New York, to T. C. Severance, a banker of Cleveland, Ohio. Neither the world nor my historian would have any particular interest in what I said, or did, after that remarkable event of January 20th, and the good sense of choosing so beautiful a portion of the earth's surface for a birthplace, until the mother of five children, with little experience in life, and less in society, having devoted myself to home and books, I was chosen, in 1853, to read before