This, with their "conversions" and baptisms, deepened Emily's longing to give the tokens required by her sect for Christian membership, but they came slowly and tardily with her, and she quaintly told how one day she was addressed by one of the congregation whose prayers had been asked for her, "What! this little girl not converted yet?
How do you suppose we can waste any more time in praying for you ?" Her intelligence was very great, and in 1832, when her mother wanted her to become a milliner, she entreated to be allowed to engage herself as a school teacher.

"I stood as tall as I could," she says, when she went to offer herself, and she was accepted, although only fifteen.

The system was that of "boarding round"-- _i.e._ the young mistress had to live a week alternately at each house, and went from thence to her school, but she found this so uncomfortable that she ended by sleeping at home every night.

She struggled on, teaching in various schools, doing needlework in after-hours, trying to improve herself, and always contending with great delicacy of health, which must have made it most trying to cope with what she calls in one of her letters "a little regiment of wild cats" for about seven years, when some of the friends she had made obtained of two sisters who kept a boarding school at Utica that she should be admitted there to pursue the higher branches of study for a year or two, and then to repay them by her services as a teacher.
The two ladies, Miss Urania and Miss Cynthia Sheldon, and their widowed sister, Mrs.Anable, proved Emily's kindest friends, and made a thoroughly happy home for her.

She was very frail and nervous, but of great power of influence, and even while still only a pupil had this gift.