Mrs. Annie Chambers Ketchum, poet, naturalist, and novelist, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, November 8, 1824, the daughter of Benjamin Stuart Chambers, founder of Cardome Academy; her mother was a member of the famous Bradford family of journalists. Miss Chambers was graduated from Georgetown Female College with the M. A. degree. Her first husband was William Bradford, whom she married in 1844, and from whom she was subsequently divorced. After her separation from her husband, she went to Memphis, Tennessee, and opened a school for girls, which she conducted for several years. In 1858 she was married to Leonidas Ketchum, a Tennessean, who was mortally wounded at the battle of Shiloh in 1863. After her husband's death, Mrs. Ketchum returned to Kentucky and conducted a school at Georgetown for three years, but, in 1866, she returned to Memphis, where she again taught for a number of years. Mrs. Ketchum spent the winter of 1875 at Paris, France, pursuing her literary work, and on May 24, 1876, she entered upon the novitiate in a convent there. She afterwards returned to America and her last years were spent in Kentucky. Mrs. Ketchum died in 1904. Her first literary work to attract attention was a novel, entitled Nellie Bracken (Philadelphia, 1855). From 1859 to 1861 Mrs. Ketchum was editor of The Lotus, a monthly magazine published at Memphis. Benny: A Christmas Ballad (New York, 1869) was the first of her poems to attract any considerable attention; and her best known poem, Semper Fidelis, originally published in Harper's Magazine for October, 1873, is a long, leisurely thing that makes one wonder at its once wide popularity. All of her poems Mrs. Ketchum brought together in Lotus Flowers (New York, 1878). Lotus was her shibboleth, and she never missed an opportunity to make use of it. She made many translations from Latin, German, and French writers, her finest work in this field being Marcella, a Russian Idyl (New York, 1878). The Teacher's Empire (1886) was a collection of educational essays contributed to various journals. Mrs. Ketchum's Botany for Academies and Colleges (Philadelphia, 1887), was a text-book in many institutions for several years subsequent to its publication.

Bibliography. History of Kentucky, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1887, v. iii); B. O. Gaines's History of Scott County, Kentucky (1905, v. ii).

APRIL TWENTY-SIXTH

[From The Southern Poems of the War, edited by Emily V. Mason (Baltimore, 1867)]

Memphis, Tennessee.