journalism not being so familiar a figure as it now is, and she had
not yet adopted her pretty _nom-de-plume,_ but her husband, David G.
Croly, held an official post on the staff as city editor, and her
contributions, which were invariably well written and interesting,
appeared from the first in the _World_ columns, and as the years went
on while she and Mr. Croly remained associated with it, with
increasing frequency. They were written by a woman mainly for women,
and the maids and matrons of her country over all its area from ocean
to ocean and from "lands of sun to lands of snow" have never been
addressed by one of their sex whom they came to know better or to hold
in higher esteem. Her work assumed no pretentious or high importance,
but was sweet and wholesome, sensible, and a mirror of the nature out
of which it proceeded. The name Jenny June, which she adopted a few
years later, became a beloved household word throughout the land,
perhaps more widely known than that of any lady journalist who has
ever wrought in it.

Mrs. Croly's social dispositions and her aptitude for gathering
interesting people around her were gracious endowments of nature's
bestowal, as strongly marked in her youth as in her maturer years,
when she gradually came to have a wider stage on which to display
them. Her pretty little drawing-rooms, somewhere on the west side near
Grove Street, are well remembered by me, and first and last I met in
them a goodly number of people well worthy to be remembered, some with
their trophies of success yet to win, but their merit divined by their
clever hostess, perhaps before it had obtained any full recognition
elsewhere. Many also came who had won their spurs and epaulets and
shone bravely in the bright glitter of both. In her little
unpretending salon of that day might be met the brilliant young Edmund
Clarence Stedman, in the morning glow of his poetic fame; Bayard