When Mrs. Simpers was quite young her father removed his family to the banks of the romantic Octoraro, near Rowlandville, and within less than two miles of the birth-place of the two poetic Ewings and the late John Cooley, and the romantic spot where Mrs. Hall lived when she wrote the poems which are published in this volume.  The soul-inspiring beauty of this romantic region seems to have had the same effect upon her mind as it had upon the other persons composing the illustrious quintette, of which she is a distinguished member, and when only seventeen years of age she began to write poetry.  At the solicitation of her friend, E.E.  Ewing, she sent the first poem she published to him, who gave it a place in The Cecil Whig, of which he was the editor and proprietor.

In 1875 Mrs. Simpers began to write for the New York Mercury, which then numbered among its contributors Ned Buntline, Harriet Prescott, George Marshall, George Arnold, Bayard Taylor, W. Scott Way, and many other distinguished writers with whom she ranked as an equal in many respects, and many of whom she excelled as a brilliant satirist and pathetic painter of the quaint and the beautiful.

For ten years she continued to contribute letters, essays, stories and poems to the Mercury, and to advocate the claims of her sex to the right of suffrage, in which she still continues to be a firm believer.  Mrs. Simpers has also contributed largely to the Woman’s Journal and other periodicals.

Though possessed of a brilliant poetic genius, Mrs. Simpers is best known as a writer of prose; and, in addition to the large quantity of matter she has contributed to the newspaper press, is the author of a story of about two hundred pages illustrative of the principles and practices and exemplifying the social life of the Friends, for which she received a prize of two hundred dollars.  This story was highly spoken of by Dr. Shelton McKenzie, with whom she was on terms of intimacy for some years immediately before his death, and also by many other distinguished writers.

On the 22d of February, 1879, the subject of this sketch married Captain John G. Simpers, who served with distinction in the Second Regiment Delaware Volunteers in the war of the rebellion.  They, at the time of writing this sketch, reside near the summit of Mount Pleasant, and within a short distance of the birth-place of Emma Alice Browne.

THE MILLER’S ROMANCE.

The miller leaned o’er the oaken door,
Quaint shadows swung on the dusty floor,
  The spider toiled in the dust o’erhead,
With restless haste, and noiseless speed,
Like one who toils for sorest need—­
  Like one who toils for bread. 
“Ha!” says the miller, “does he pause to hark—­
        Hark!  Hark!  Hark! 
To the voice of the waters, down in the dark—­
        Dark!  Dark!  Dark! 
Turning the lumbering, mumbling wheel;