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For several Sundays she went regularly to the “Progressive Friends'” meeting and spoke with unvarying success. Then she was invited to go to Mullica Hill, New Jersey, to speak on the subject, “Woman’s Work.” After discussing the matter with her mother and the Longshores, she accepted the invitation and set herself to prepare the lecture which she was to give. Then, on the first Sunday in April, the seventeen-year-old orator went to her trial experience as an invited speaker. By that time her praises had been widely sung, and when she rose and saw her audience there was a sea of upturned, eager faces looking into hers. Speaking from the depths of her own experience, she held the audience in breathless silence for over an hour. There was, it was said, an indescribable pathos in her full, rich voice that, aside from what she said, touched the hearts of her hearers and moved many to tears, while all were spellbound, and at the close of her address no one moved. Finally a man rose and voiced the feeling of the people.

“We will not disperse until the speaker promises to address us again this evening,” he said, and a burst of applause greeted his statement. A starry-eyed girl stood and bowed her acknowledgment and agreed to speak again. As the audience dispersed Anna heard some one say, “If Lucretia Mott had made that speech it would be thought a great one.”

As she promised, in the evening she spoke again on slavery, with equal success. A collection which was taken up for her amounted to several dollars, the first financial result of what was to be her golden resource.

But Anna had no thought of doing public speaking as her only means of earning her living. She continued to look for positions, but without success. Finally she took a district school in Bucks County, at a monthly salary of twenty-five dollars. So interested was she in the “Progressive Friends'” Sunday meetings that she went home every second week to attend them, and her speeches always won applause from an audience that had learned to anticipate the impassioned statements of the bright-eyed girl who was so much younger and so much more intense than any other speaker.

And now she began to receive invitations to speak in other places. On her eighteenth birthday she spoke in a small village about thirty miles out of Philadelphia, when she fairly electrified her hearers by the force of her arguments and the form in which she presented them. She continued to teach, although during her summer vacation she made many speeches in New Jersey. On one occasion she spoke in the open air, in a beautiful grove where hundreds had come to hear “the girl orator” give her views on temperance and slavery. Her earnestness and conviction of the truth of what she said made a profound impression, and even those who later criticized her speech as being the product of an immature and superficial mind were held as by a spell while she spoke, and secretly admired her while they openly ridiculed her arguments. At another time she was asked to speak at the laying of the corner-stone of a new Methodist church. The clergymen who gathered together were inclined to be severe in their judgment of the remarks of a “slip of a girl.” Anna knew that and resolved to speak with more than usual pathos and power. When she began her address amusement was evident on the faces of the dignified men looking at her. Gradually they grew more interested, the silence became intense, and when the men rose to leave they were subdued, and some of them even were not ashamed to be seen wiping away tears. One of them introduced himself to her and with a cordial hand-shake said: “Miss Dickinson, I have always ridiculed Woman’s Rights, but, so help me God, I never shall again.”