“No, doctor, you gave me a proscription,” she answered.  The doctor’s smile showed her that she had made a mistake, and as soon as they were outside she asked the teacher who was with her what she ought to have said.

“Prescription, prescription,” she repeated.  “I must remember that.  What was it we had in church last Sunday?  Was that a prescription or a proscription?”

“That was a subscription,” the teacher told her.

“Oh, yes, a subscription.  But what did you call the writing on the stones in the graveyard?  Was that a prescription or a subscription?”

“That was an inscription,” was the answer, and perhaps it is small wonder that Anna exclaimed in despair, “Oh, this terrible English!  Can I ever get it!”

On the whole, however, she was very much at home with the English language.  One morning as she was going down to breakfast some one asked, “How is our little China girl this morning?” “Neither cracked nor broken!” was her instant response.

During all her stay in America she was in great demand as a speaker, and did as much of this work as her health permitted, always giving her message in English, and everywhere winning friends for herself and her loved people.  “Those who have watched her as she held the attention of large audiences with the simple story of her own people, will not soon forget the modest, unassuming girl who touched their lives for a brief hour,” says one who heard her often.

When she entered Folts Institute it was thought that it would be a good thing for her to take vocal lessons to strengthen her throat and lungs.  This training was given simply for the sake of her health, and with no expectation that she would ever sing in public, but it soon became evident that she had musical ability of no small degree.  Her voice was very sweet, and had such a power to capture the hearts of her hearers that she was given the title of the “Sweet Singer,” and was in great demand for meetings large and small.  The whole energy of her life was so given to her Master that this newly discovered gift was at once consecrated wholly to His service.  “You may think me narrow,” she said earnestly, when her teacher proposed that she should study some nature songs, “but I feel that I must be the girl of one song.”  And into the one song, the Christian hymn, she put her whole soul, as any who heard her sing, “I love to tell the story,” “Faith of our fathers,” or the one that she perhaps sang most often, “Saved by Grace,” will testify.

“I can hear her still as she sang ‘Saved by Grace’ to the large audience of the General Executive in 1902,” wrote one, several years later.  “She put such fulness of meaning and power into this simple song.  It was a part of her own experience.”  Another said, “I heard her sing ’I love to tell the story’ to an audience of over five hundred college girls at the student conference of the Young Women’s Christian Association at Silver Bay, and the effect was wonderful.”