and Mothers' Club, Floral Emblem Society, Ladies' Physiological Institute, Women's Educational and Industrial Union (life member), and Phi Eta Sigma (Emerson College) Oratory. She is also a member, and was for three years secretary, of the General Washington Memorial Association.
After the death of her husband she turned her attention in another line, and entered the Emerson College of Oratory in 1901, taking the full course, and, graduating 1904, will continue through the post-graduate, 1905. She is this year (1904) a student at the Harvard Summer School.
Mrs. Bigelow is a woman of strong character. She is well known in the social world. Her sympathies are quick, her appreciation very keen, her loyalty never failing, her charity unbounded.
ELISABETH SOPHIA MERRITT GOSSE was born in Salem, Mass., being the daughter of Henry and Elisabeth (Hood) Merritt. Her father, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Merritt, at the breaking out of the war of the Rebellion was on the staff of General Joseph Andrews, in command at Fort Warren, later going to the front, where, at the head of his regiment, the Twenty-third Massachusetts, he was killed at the battle of Newbern, N.C.
Mrs. Gosse's mother was the daughter of the Rev. Jacob Hood, a well-known Congregational clergyman. Mrs. Gosse is descended from Robert Moulton, an Admiral in the British navy; also from Governor Bradstreet, Roger Conant, and other notables of colonial days.
It is a curious coincidence that her great-great-grandfather. Captain Samuel Flint, killed in the battle of Saratoga in 1777, was the highest officer from Essex County who gave his life for his country in the war of the Revolution; and the same is true of her father, Colonel Merritt, in the war of the sixties. Another ancestor, Colonel Philip Gardner, was killed in the French and Indian wars, in colonial days. It is said that no woman in Massachusetts has a longer record of military ancestry than Mrs. Gosse.
Elisabeth S. Merritt (to use the name she bore in her student days) was educated in public and private schools of Salem, the Chelsea High School, Salem Normal School, and the Rockford Woman's College, at Rockford, 111. She married Mr. Charles Harrison Gosse, of an old Salem family. For a few years Mr. and Mrs. Gosse resided in Salem, but later removed to Boston, where Mrs. Gosse's literary ability soon attracted attention, and she received requests for her work from three of the leading Boston journals.
In 1888 .she went to Bar Harbor as a society correspondent for the Transcript and other Boston papers. The excellence of her work caused it to be copied by other society editors in every part of the United States. She was especially fortunate in having as personal friends Mrs. William Morris Hunt, the first Mrs. William C. Whitney, and Colonel Elliott F. Shepard, who had been a close friend of her father.
Returning to Boston in the fall of that year, she was sent to Lenox by the Boston Herald, with which paper she has since been prominently connected, having held staff positions in five different departments, giving her prob-ably a more varied career than that of any other newspaper woman in New England and one with many picturesque experiences. From the society department of the Herald she passed into the department of special writers, where she received exceptional training in political and editorial work. Later the special and city departments of the Herald were consolidated, and for three years Mrs. Gosse gained invaluable experience in reportorial work. Especially notable feats in this line accomplished by her were the reporting of the great costume ball of the Boston Artists' Association, given in the Art Museum several years ago, on which occasion four men reporters and several artists worked under her direction; the reporting of a convention in Tremont Temple, for which she received from the Herald a check for one hundred and two dollars, at that time said to be the largest check ever paid to a woman journalist in New England for a single week's work, and the reporting of the evolutions of the North Atlantic Squadron off the coast of Maine,
