Page:Tributes to Helen Bell, Woman's Progress, April 1895.djvu/3

196 Manufacturers and Mechanics' Bank, of which he was then the President, and on these notes it remained until the bank became a National Bank, which necessitated their destruction. Strange prophecy of the future! Even as a child Helen Bell became the bearer of good tidings, gladdening the hearts of many a toiler as the bank notes passed from land to land and carried with them the smiling face of the guileless one.



School days followed—first with Miss Griffith; then, as the little maiden grew older, with Miss Mary Anna Longstreth, when she developed rapidly, studying with that persistent earnestness that makes success a certainty, and she easily held the headship of her classes in English, Latin and French."

One of her schoolmates and dearest friends thus writes: "She was devoted to books and literature, and while as a school girl she did not seem to devote much time to absolute study, her quickness of perception enabled her at a glance to glean as much from the pages of an allotted task as hours of study would bring to me; and she often rallied me on being too conscientious over my lessons, yet what she gained in this way was a permanent possession with her long after it had faded to indistinctness in the minds of other apparently closer and more thorough students. She had always a great love for things original, simple and different from the regular routine; and from beginning to end cared less about dress, except as it affected others, than almost anyone I ever knew."

"She was always constant in her attachments and friendships, never in the widening circle of later years losing sight of any of the friends of her girlhood—and, after any separation, long or short, meeting them with just the same loving interest in all that concerned them. She had the rare faculty of being the nearest and dearest to many without allowing herself to become absorbed even partially in any one of them to the exclusion of another."

"There was an unusually strong bond of understanding and sympathy between her and her mother, and with that mother's illness and death came a great awakening from a sort of dreamy listlessness that had possessed her largely, hitherto, to the practical realities of life. She soon after united in full membership with the Moravian Church and her character ripened rapidly. After her father's death, she developed as executor of her parents' estate that