her services in constant demand by the great denomination to which she belongs. By earnest request she was induced to take charge of the song-service in the National Baptist Anniversaries in Saratoga, Asbury Park, Chicago, Cincinnati and other cities. It is a rare circumstance indeed for a woman to direct the singing of thousands of untrained voices, without the use of a baton, but her ringing tones and plain enunciation have enabled her with fine effect to handle the vast congregations, to the delight of the throngs and to the surprise of musical critics. She has a very clear, rich and sympathetic voice.
NORTON, Mrs. Della Whitney, poet, author and Christian Scientist, born in Fort Edward, N. Y., 1st January, 1840. She was educated mainly in Fort Edward Academy. She commenced to write at an early age. Before her twelfth year she was a regular contributor, as Miss Della E. Whitney, to several Boston and New York papers and magazines. The Boston "Cultivator" published her
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DELLA WHITNEY NORTON.
first literary efforts. Afterward she contributed to the "Galaxy," "Scribner's Magazine," "Ladies' Repository," the "Christian Union," the "Advance," the "Boston Repository" and other journals. The International Sunday-School Association a few years ago offered prizes for the best hymns on the lessons for the year. Mrs. Norton wrote fifty-nine hymns in about ten days, which were accepted, and among eight-hundred competitors she won three first prizes. She became an invalid when thirteen years of age, and for many years suffered excruciatingly. In January, 1874, she became the wife of H. B. Norton, of Rochester, N. Y. She has one son, Frank Whitney Norton, a promising boy of sixteen. Madame Parepa Rosa, the Italian prima donna, sent her manager on a journey of five-hundred miles to request of Mrs. Norton a song for concert purposes, when Mrs. Norton wrote the humorous poem, "Do Not Slam the Gate" which has since been sung and published the world over. In spite of delicate health, she has always been identified with every good work in church, society and humanitarian directions. The Woman's Christian Temperance Unions, Woman Suffrage Associations, Woman's Relief Corps, Woman's Industrial Exchanges, hospital boards and private charities have absorbed her time for many years to the almost entire exclusion of literary labor. A few years ago she was restored to health, after surgeons and physicians had failed to help, by fixing her faith on God as a healing power, and since then she has given her whole time to the work of healing others, and preaching the gospel of Christian Science, in private and public, as revealed to her in the Scripture, and demonstrated through the restoration of the blind and lame, the diseased and deformed, the conversion of infidels and the cure of
the evil of intemperance and kindred habits. She has been in that work seven years, greatly blessed, and is soon to be ordained for the public ministry. Her home is in Minneapolis, Minn.
NORTON, Mrs. Minerva Brace, educator and author, born in Rochester, N. Y., 7th January, 1837. Her father, Harvey Brace, moved to Michigan and, when she was nine years old, to Janesville,
Wis., where her youth was spent. Her education was received in the schools of Janesville, and under Miss Mary Mortimer, in Milwaukee College, and in Baraboo Seminary, where she was graduated in 1861. She spent the years of her early womanhood as a teacher in the schools where she had studied, her favorite lines of study and work being metaphysics, mathematics and history. She was assistant editor of the "Little Corporal" in Chicago, in 1866, and has since done considerable editorial work. She became the wife of Rev. Smith Norton, 18th April, 1867, and she has devoted most of the years of her married life to domestic and parish duties, varied by teaching, from 1871 to 1874, in the College for Women, Evanston, Ill., and as principal of the ladies' department of Ripon College, from 1874 to 1876. She traveled from 1886 to 1888 over England, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. In 1890 she was again abroad, traveling with her husband in England, France, Belgium and Holland. She has always done much missionary work in her own country. She was a secretary of the Woman's Board of Missions, Boston, Mass., in 1876 and 1877, and has since spent three years with her husband in home missionary work in Dakota. She has used her pen much in benevolent work and has published many articles on various topics during the last quarter century in periodicals, including the "Independent," "Christian Union," New York "Observer," New York "Evangelist," "Congregationalist," "Advance," "Sunday-School Times," "Journal of Education," "Education" and "Wide Awake." Her home is now in Beloit, Wis. She comes of Revolutionary and New England stock, the Braces, of Connecticut, and the Thompsons, of New Hampshire and Vermont. She is the author of "In and Around Berlin" (Chicago, 1889), and, jointly with her husband, of "Service in the King's Guards" (Boston, 1891). She now has a "Memoir of Miss Mary Mortimer" ready for the press.
NORTON, Miss Morilla M., specialist in French literature, born in Ogden, N. Y., 22nd September, 1865. Her father is Rev. Smith Norton, descended from the Maine and Massachusetts families of Norton and Weston, and her mother was Morilla E. Hill Norton, a rare and cultivated woman, who died in the early infancy of her only daughter. She was a niece of Madame Willard,
