The last of this group of nineteenth century amateurs was Isabel Florence Hapgood.[24] She was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1850 and passed most of her early life in Worcester. She early became interested in translating and after working in the chief European languages, began to teach herself Russian. She started work on translating Tolstoy and also published a book on the byliny, _Epic Songs of Russia_. In 1887 she made her first visit to Russia and met many important officials and writers. For the next twenty years, she dominated the Russian translation field in the United States with many translations from Tolstoy, Turgenev and other authors. In 1906 she brought out her greatest piece of work, a translation and adaptation of the Service Books of the Russian Orthodox Church, for which she received a gold watch from Tsar Nicholas II. The work was reprinted several times then, and again after World War I by the Young Men’s Christian Association in Paris. For years she was a well known figure at the services of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York. She rarely missed a service and she carefully explained the ritual and its significance to the Americans who attended. Miss Hapgood paid another visit to Russia during the winter of 1916–1917 and on that occasion she was received by the Tsarina. She was in St. Petersburg when the Russian Revolution broke out. Her friends succeeded in getting her out of the capital and in enabling her to return to the United States through Vladivostok. Before her death in 1928, she saw her work replaced in large part by newer translations and she keenly felt the destruction of the old regime with which she had been connected for almost half a century. Yet her importance as one of the first serious translators from Russian into English must not be forgotten. She still remains an interesting figure in American-Russian relations. This brief review of the leading figures makes it clear that they worked outside the educational system of the United States. They were persons who had developed, for one reason or another, a personal interest in Slavic affairs. Many of them had lived in one capacity or another, largely as members of the American diplomatic service, in some Slavic country. They were strict individualists and did not try to develop students or assistants. They worked as they pleased and on what they pleased and if their work was later recognized, they often paid no attention to it except for the pride any person feels in recognition and honor. During this entire period, the colleges and universities had taken no part in the development. The educational system ignored both the Slavic culture and the steadily increasing number of Slavic immigrants. They continued the usual curricula and developed their courses and work in the traditional languages of Western Europe.