ould be easy to lag behind, but I
try not to. It means continual reading and study to keep up with the
modern way of doing things, but I manage to do it, and when the time
comes that I cannot do my work in a satisfactory manner I want the
Board of Education to discharge me and get some one else."

In testimony to these facts one of the daily papers of Detroit wrote her
up in 1910, saying that she had kept her interest in modern pedagogic
methods, maintained a high standard of scholarship in her school, and
retained her sympathy with little children, who had rewarded her
devotion to her work with their appreciation and love. To show how well
she is loved by her pupils the writer was careful to state that these
children as a gay group often surrounded her on her way to school,
clinging to her hands, crowding about her as best they may, all
chattering and pouring out accounts of their little doings.
"Frequently," says this writer, "she is stopped on the street by grown
men and women who long ago were her pupils and who have remembered her,
though with the passing of the years, and the new classes of little ones
who come to her every term, she has forgotten them."[11] Many have been
accustomed to bring their children to the Everett School and speak of
how glad they will be when these little ones will be under the care of
their parents' former teacher.

Miss Richards estimates that in the years of school work, she has had in
her room an average of fifty pupils a term, although sometimes the
attendance overflowed to a much greater number. With eighty-eight terms
of teaching to her credit, the number of pupils who owe part of their
education to "this gentle and cultured woman" amounts well up into the
tens of thousands, enough to populate a fair-sized city.

We can not close this article with a better testimonial than the
following letter from one of her former pupils, the Honorable Charles T.
Wilkins, a lawyer and an influential white citizen, who addressed her on
the occasion of her retirement last June.

"_My dear Miss Richards_: The friendship of so long standing between
your family and mine, and the high esteem in which, as an educator, a
woman, and a Christian, you were always held by my father the late
Colonel William D. Wilkins, lead me to take the liberty of writing to
_congratulate_ you upon the well-earned retirement from active work,
which I have just learned from the press that you contemplate