the New York Bible and Fruit Mission, and in her visits with that organization to Blackwells Island, Harts Island, Wards Island, and others, where the cities' paupers, lunatics, imbeciles, incurables and convicts were quartered, she saw enough to convince her that no such being as a God could exist and that the question of existence had only a physical basis. After spending six years in the study and practice of medicine, she was obliged to abandon it because of threatened nervous prostration. Career Medicine Sheldon spent two years at the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, and nearly seven years in hospitals, helping the physicians in many ways. Concerning her work in the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane, Dr. James M. Kenniston wrote about her in the Portland Express-Advertiser, the largest paper in Maine:— Writing Sheldon started earning her own living at the age of seventeen. She began writing verses at the age of ten years, but it was not until she was twenty-five that she placed a monetary value upon her written work. From that time, she began filling in odd hours with her writing. Like many another prominent authors of her day, Sheldon's first successes were made through the columns of the New York Mercury. Sheldon's poem entitled "The Medical Student's Dream," together with some prose work, was requested for the exhibit of New York State literature by the Board of Managers at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. By 1900, her published stories amounted to over two hundred and her humorous verses were known to every editor of a Sunday newspaper and pictorial weekly in the United States. From 1900–02, she worked under contract with one of the large publishing houses of New York City. In one year alone (1900), Sheldon's published work amounted to over one million words, and not a week passed without a story from her pen appearing upon the bookstands. In 1901, Sheldon spent six months at Saratoga Springs, New York before returning to New York City, having benefitted by the change of air and long-continued rest. Sheldon wrote war poetry for The New York Times, the New York Times Current History Magazine, and Munsey's Magazine. Perhaps the best efforts of Sheldon were the occasional serious articles which appeared in various periodicals for advanced thought, for they demonstrated the writer to be not only an essayer of fiction, but