ughters, and from
that time until she was fifteen she lived alternately with them. Then
she made her first essay in teaching a small private school.

At sixteen she commenced life as a teacher of public schools, and
continued the same for more than ten years, or until 1850.

To illustrate her determined and persistent spirit during the first four
years of her life as a teacher she taught country schools during the
summer and winter, and during the spring and fall attended the academy
in her native town, working for her board in private families.

At the age of twenty-one, through the influence of Noah Woods, Esq., she
obtained an appointment as principal of one of the Grammar Schools in
Gardiner, Maine, where she remained until the fall of 1847. At the end
of that time she resigned and accepted an appointment as assistant in
the Winthrop Grammar School, Charlestown, Massachusetts, obtained for
her by her cousin, Stacy Baxter, Esq., the principal of the Harvard
Grammar School in the same city. There she remained until the winter of
1849-50, when she applied for a similar situation in the Putnam Grammar
School, East Cambridge (where higher salaries were paid) and was
successful. She remained, however, only until May, when a severe attack
of acute bronchitis so prostrated her strength as to quite unfit her for
her duties during the whole summer. She had previously suffered
repeatedly from pneumonia. Her situation was held for her until the
autumn, when finding her health not materially improved, she resigned
and prepared to spend the winter at the South in the family of a brother
residing at Charleston, South Carolina.

Miss Bradley returned from Charleston the following spring. Her winter
in the South had not benefited her as she had hoped and expected, and
she found herself unable to resume her occupation as a teacher.

During the next two years her active spirit chafed in forced idleness,
and life became almost a burden. In the autumn of 1853, going to
Charlestown and Cambridge to visit friends, she met the physician who
had attended her during the severe illness that terminated her
teacher-life. He examined her lungs, and gave it as his opinion that
only a removal to a warmer climate could preserve her life through
another winter, and that the following months of frost and cold spent in
the North must undoubtedly in her case develop pulmonary consumption.

To her these were words of doom. Not possessed of the mean