Emma Azalia Hackley was an African-American singer and political activist. She promoted racial pride through her support and promotion of music education for African Americans. Born Emma Azalia Smith in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she learned to play the piano at age three and took voice and violin lessons as a child.

Books for girls are frankly suggestive, their value lying in their kindling power. Among the girls of all sorts who may read this story, there will be, here and there, one who loves right words. It is for the sake of such an occasional reader that the poems mentioned have been included. The schools sometimes lead their pupils to believe that English literature, like Latin, belongs to the past. But there are, here and now, "musicians of the word" who, partly because they are living, can touch our hearts as none of the dead-and-gone ones can. If through these pages some girl finds her way to the little green volume of Singing Leaves, or the sweet stories of Daphne and King Sylvaine and Queen Aimée, Catherine Smith and her friends will have done the world of girls a service worth the doing.

Emma Azalia Hackley was an African-American singer and political activist. She promoted racial pride through her support and promotion of music education for African Americans. Born Emma Azalia Smith in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she learned to play the piano at age three and took voice and violin lessons as a child.

"The best bed-chamber, with its hangings of crimson moreen, was opened and aired--a performance which always caused my eight little brothers and sisters to place themselves in convenient positions for being stumbled over, to the great annoyance of industrious damsels, who, armed with broom and duster, endeavored to render their reign as arbitrary as it was short. For some time past, the nursery-maids had invariably silenced refractory children with "Fie, Miss Matilda! Your grandmother will make you behave yourself--she won't allow such doings, I'll be bound!" or "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Master Clarence? What will your grandmother say to that!" The nursery was in a state of uproar on the day of my venerable relative's arrival; for the children almost expected to see, in their grandmother, an ogress, both in features and disposition."