witnessed in plantation life, and while in this condition she made a solemn vow that whatever of life remained to her should be given to the work of ameliorating the condition of the Colored people. Here her great work begins. She made up her mind to do something for the education of free Colored girls, with the idea that through the influence of educated Colored women she could lay the solid foundations for the disenthrallment of their race. She selected the district for the field of her efforts, because it was the common property of the nation, and because the laws of the district gave her the right to educate _free_ Colored children, and she attempted to teach none others. She opened her plan to many of the leading friends of freedom, in an extensive correspondence, but found especially, at this time, a wise and warm encourager and counsellor in her scheme, in William R. Smith, a Friend, of Farmington, near Rochester, New York, in whose family she was now a private teacher. Her correspondents generally gave her but little encouragement, but wished her God-speed in what she should dare in the good cause. One Friend wrote her from Philadelphia; entering warmly into her scheme, but advised her to wait till funds could be collected. "I do not want the wealth of Croesus," was her reply; and the Friend sent her $100, and with this capital, in the autumn of 1851, she came to Washington to establish a Normal School for the education of Colored girls, having associated with her Miss Anna Inman, an accomplished and benevolent lady of the Society of Friends, from Southfield, Rhode Island, who, however, after teaching a class of Colored girls in French, in the house of Jonathan Jones, on the island, through the winter, returned to New England. In the autumn of 1851 Miss Miner commenced her remarkable work here in a small room, about fourteen feet square, in the frame house then, as now, owned and occupied by Edward C. Younger, a Colored man, as his dwelling, on Eleventh Street, near New York Avenue. With but two or three girls to open the school, she soon had a roomful, and to secure larger accommodation, moved, after a couple of months, to a house on F Street, north, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth streets, west, near the houses then occupied by William T. Carroll and Charles H. Winder. This house furnished her a very comfortable room for her school, which was composed of well-behaved girls from the best Colored families of the district. The persecution of those neighbors, however, compelled her to leave, as the Colored family who occupied the house was threatened with conflagration, and after one month her little school found a more unmolested home in the dwelling-house of a German family on K Street, near the western market. After tarrying a few months here, she moved to L Street, into a room in the building known, as "The Two Sisters," then occupied by a white family. She now saw that the success of her school demanded a school-house, and in