ition to the school throughout the district was strong and
very general, among the old as well as the young. Even Walter Lenox,
who, as mayor, when the school was first started, gave the teacher
assurances of favor in her work, came out in 1857, following the
prevailing current of depraved public sentiment and feeding its tide,
in an elaborate article in the "National Intelligencer," under his own
signature; assailed the school in open and direct language, urging
against it that it was raising the standard of education among the
Colored population, and distinctly declaring that the white population
of the district would not be just to themselves to permit the
continuance of an institution which had the temerity to extend to the
Colored people "a degree of instruction so far beyond their social and
political condition, which condition must continue," the article goes
on to say, "in this and every other slave-holding community." This
article, though fraught with extreme ideas, and to the last degree
prescriptive and inflammatory, neither stirred any open violence, nor
deterred the courageous woman in the slightest degree from her work.
When madmen went to her school-room threatening her with personal
violence, she laughed them to shame; and when they threatened to burn
her house, she told them that they could not stop her in that way, as
another house, better than the old, would immediately rise from its
ashes.

The house was set on fire in the spring of 1860, when Miss Miner was
asleep in the second story, alone, in the night-time, but the smell of
the smoke awakened her in time to save the building and herself from
the flames, which were extinguished. The school-girls, also, were
constantly at the mercy of coarse and insulting boys along the
streets, who would often gather in gangs before the gate to pursue and
terrify these inoffensive children, who were striving to gather wisdom
and understanding in their little sanctuary. The police took no
cognizance of such brutality in those days. But their dauntless
teacher, uncompromising, conscientious, and self-possessed in her
aggressive work, in no manner turned from her course by this
persecution, was, on the other hand, stimulated thereby to higher
vigilance and energy in her great undertaking. The course of
instruction in the school was indeed of a higher order than had
hitherto been opened to the Colored people of the district, as was
denounced against the school by Wal