when she was the guest of Admiral Gherardi and the only passenger allowed by the Secretary of the Navy on board the flagship "Philadelphia."
Mrs. Gosse has travelled hundreds of miles in the service of the Herald, accompanying President Harrison, President Cleveland, and the late Secretary Blaine upon long journeys. Upon the occasion of the latter's resignation from the Harrison cabinet she went to Wash- ington, and, returning to Boston with Secretary and Mrs. Blaine, remained with them at the Brunswick for three days, while awaiting the returns from the Minneapolis convention, the only woman in a small army of representatives of all the prominent dailies in the country. She was present when Mr. Blaine received and read the despatch announcing the nomination of Mr. Harrison and the death-blow of his own hopes. "I knew," she said at the time, " that I was looking on while his- tory was being made." That night she accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Blaine to Bar Harbor. A week later the death of Emmons Blaine, in Chicago, entailed uppn her another long journey.
Mrs. Gosse also achieved great success as a special correspondent, her work always being of intense interest. Her interviews with Cardinal Gibbons were copied into nearly every Catholic publication in the country. She interviewed Presidents Cleveland and Harrison and many members of their Cabinets.
Especially notable service was rendered the Herald by Mrs. Gosse when she carried the news of the death of James Russell Lowell from Bar Harbor to President Eliot at his summer residence at Seal Harbor, and later that of George William Curtis. In each instance she rode twenty-two miles at midnight over the roads of Mount Desert, to telegraph his tributes to those great men to her paper. During one Presidential campaign she remained in Maine until after the State election, reporting the speeches of many prominent political orators.
Mrs. Gosse was among the first to discern the importance and phenomenal development of the woman's club movement. She established the department "Among the Women's Clubs" in the Sunday Herald, which she still conducts, and also that known as "Colonial and Patriotic," a record of the happenings among the hereditary patriotic societies.
In addition to her work for the Herald, Mrs. Gosse has done much special work for the New York Mail and Express and the New York Herald, also for such publications as the North American Review, the New England Magazine, Harper's Bazar, Wide Awake, and Lippincott's. Mrs. Gosse has been prominently identified with the New England Woman's Press Association from the beginning. For several years she was chairman of the programme committee, preparing some of the most successful entertainments in the history of the club, and she was its president in 1898. Upon retiring from the presidency she was made honorary vice-president for life.
She was founder and is vice-president of the Boston Woman's Press Club, has been four times elected president of the Boston Business League, and is also president for life of the Boston Floral Emblem Society. She has been much interested in reform work, being a prominent promoter of the movement to secure police matrons. She was also for a time press superintendent of the W. C. T. U. Deeply interested in music and a fine musician herself, she has been an active worker in the Easter Music and Flower Mission to Hospitals.
Mrs. Gosse has been an enthusiastic organizer of women's clubs, .several of prominence in various parts of New England o,wing their existence to her efforts. She has several times as a delegate attendetl the biennial convention of the General Federation of W'omen's Clubs. The family of Mrs. Gosse were among the leading anti-slavery leaders in Essex County, and enjoyed the friendship of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Lloyd Garrison, and many others prominent at that time. It was well known that the poet Whittier, although a fiery abolitionist, deprecated war. On one occasion early in 1861 he escaped from Newburyport to avoid a military demonstration, only to meet at dinner, at the friend's home in the country where he sought refuge, the father of Mrs. Gosse, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt, in full uniform. The two became fast friends,
