devote her life to the relief of suffering. She had charge, for some time, of the "Open Door," a home for fallen women, in Omaha, Neb. She is one of the King's Daughters, and her purpose is usefulness. She now resides in Omaha.
LANZA, Marquise Clara, author, born in Fort Riley, a military post in Kansas, where her
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MARQUISE CLARA LANZA.
father, Dr. W. A. Hammond, the celebrated physician and specialist, then in the service of the government, was stationed, 12th February, 1858. Her father removed to New York City when she was seven years old, and she has lived in that city ever since, with the exception of several protracted visits to Europe. She was educated in a French
school in New York, and, after finishing her course there, studied in Paris and Dresden. Her training and reading cover a wide range. In 1877 she became the wife of the Marquis de Lanza, of Palermo, Sicily. Her family consists of three sons. Although she has written from her early girlhood, her literary career did not begin until her first novel, "Mr. Perkins' Daughter," was published in 1884. That was followed by "A Righteous Apostate" (1886), and by a collection of short stories, "Tales of Eccentric Life" (1887), "Basil Morton's Transgression" (1890), "A Modern Marriage" (1891), and "A Golden Pilgrimage" (1892). She has written much for the magazines, and at one time occupied herself exclusively with journalism. She is an accomplished mandolinist, and occasionally performs in charitable entertainments. She is the center of a circle of clever people in New York City.
LARCOM, Miss Lucy, poet and author, born in Beverly, Mass., in 1826. Her father was a sea-captain, who died while she was a child, and her mother, taking with her this daughter and two or three others of her younger children, removed to Lowell, Mass.
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LUCY LARCOM.
The year 1835 found Lucy, a girl of about ten years, in one of the Lowell grammar schools, where her education went on until it became necessary for her to earn her living, which she began to do very early as an operative in a cotton factory. In her "Idyl of Work" and also in "A New England Girlhood" Miss Larcom has described her early life. In the "Idyl" the mill-life of forty or fifty years ago is portrayed, and, in following the career of some of those bright spirits, watching their success in their varied pathways through life, it is very pleasant to know that the culture, the self-sacrifice and the effort begun in that hard school have developed characters so noble and prepared them so well for their appointed life-work. Her biographer writes: "My first recollection of
Miss Larcom is as a precocious writer of verse in the Lowell 'Casket,' and that the editor in his notice of them said 'they were written under the inspiration of the nurses, a misprint, of course, for muses; although, as the author was only ten or twelve years old at that time, the mistake was not so very far wrong. That was not Miss Larcom's first attempt at verse-making, for she began to write while a child of seven in the attic of her early home in Beverly." Miss Larcom's first work as a Lowell operative was in a spinning-room, doffing and replacing the bobbins, after which she tended a spinning-frame and then a dressing-frame, beside pleasant windows looking towards the river. Later she was employed in a "cloth-room," a more agreeable working-place, on account of its fewer hours
of confinement, its cleanliness and the absence of machinery. The last two years of her Lowell life, which covered in all a period of about ten years, were spent in that room, not in measuring cloth, but as book-keeper, recording the number of pieces and bales. There she pursued her studies in intervals of leisure. Some text-books in mathematics, grammar, English or German literature usually lay open on her desk, awaiting a spare moment. The Lowell "Offering," a magazine whose editors and
