Chapter I: COPY in substance, and sometimes verbatim, the account written in (4)

WHAT one of Doctor Terhune’s biographers has alluded to as his “splendid vitality,” had been cruelly taxed by his professional labors in his first charge in Brooklyn. With a strong man’s aversion to the acknowledgment of physical weakness, he had fought, with heroic courage and reserve, the inroads of a disease that was steadily sapping his constitution and vigor. None except his physician and myself dreamed of the gnawing pain that was never quiet during his waking hours, and robbed the nights of rest. The services of Sunday left him as weak as a child, and stretched him upon the rack all of that night. When, the work he had assigned to himself soon after accepting the pastorate of the Bedford Avenue Church having been accomplished, he resigned the position, and quoted his physician’s advice that he should take a few months of rest and change of scene—the information was couched in terms so light that, with the exception of two or three of his chosen and most faithful friends, his parishioners had no suspicion of his real condition. The public press hazarded the wildest and most absurd guesses at the causes that had stirred the nest he had builded wisely and well during the last seven years.

Perhaps the theory that amused us most, and flew most widely from the mark, was “that his wife—known to the public as ‘Marion Harland’—took no interest in church-work—in fact, never attended church at all.” My class of forty-four splendid “boys”—the youngest being twenty-one years of age—begged to be allowed to look up the imaginative reporter and, as the Springfield member of the Church Militant had proposed, “fire him out.” Calmer counter-statements from older heads, and hearts as loyal, met the assertion in print and in private. To me, it weighed less than a grain of dust in the greater solicitude that engrossed my thoughts. For, in a week after the formal resignation of his office, the patient sufferer was under the surgeon’s knife.

They called it “a minor operation,” and enjoined complete rest, for a month or so, that ought to bring recuperation of energies so sadly depleted that those who knew him best were urgent in the entreaty that the mandate should be obeyed. He “rested” in the blessed quiet of Sunnybank for a couple of months; then set out for a leisurely jaunt westward. He had been invited to preach in Omaha, and thought that he would “take a look at the country” which he had never visited. He got no further than Chicago, falling in love with the warm-hearted people of a church which he agreed to supply for “a few weeks.” The weeks grew into seven months of active and satisfying work among his new parishioners. Our eldest daughter was with him part of the time, and I went to him for a visit of considerable length, returning home with the sad conviction, deep down in my soul, that to accept the offered “call” to a permanent pastorate would be suicidal. He could never do half-way work, and he loved the duties of his profession with a love that never abated. By the beginning of the next summer, he was forced to admit to himself that his physical powers were inadequate to the task laid to his hand. Yet, on the way home, he was lured into agreeing to supply the pulpit of a friend, a St. Louis clergyman, during the vacation of the latter, preaching zealously and eloquently for five weeks, and this in the heat of a Missourian summer.

It was but a wreck of his old, buoyant self that he brought back to us. Confident in his ability to rise above “temporary weakness,” he insisted that “Sunnybank and home-rest were all he needed to set him up again as good as new.”

I had said once, jestingly, in his hearing, after his quick recovery from a short and sharp attack of illness:

“It is hard to kill a Terhune. Nothing is really effectual except a stroke of lightning, and that will paralyze but one side. None of them die under ninety!”

He reminded me of the foolish speech, many and many a time, in the weeks that dragged themselves by us who watched the steady ebb of vital forces and the pitiable failure of all remedial agencies. He was the finest horseman I have ever known, and, as I have already said, sat his saddle as if he were a part of the spirited animal he bestrode. “Let me once get into the saddle again, and all will be right,” had been his hopeful prognostication in every illness prior to this mysterious disorder. He mounted his horse a few times after he got home, and rode for a mile or two, but listlessly and with pain. Then he ceased to ask for the old-time tonic that had acted like a magic potion upon the exhausted body, in answer to the indomitable spirit. The spring of desire and courage was not broken, but it bent more and more visibly daily, until it was a gray wraith of the former man that lay, hour after hour, upon the library sofa, uncomplaining and patient, utterly indifferent to things that once brought light to the eyes and ring to the voice. Even his voice—a marvel up to seventy-five, for sweetness, resonance, and strength—quavered and broke when he forced himself to speak.

In this, our sore and unprecedented extremity, we who watched him took counsel together and urged him to go to the city and consult Doctor McBurney, the ablest specialist and surgeon in New York, and with no superior in America. The patient offered feeble opposition. It was easier to do as we wished, than to argue the point. Our eldest daughter was living in New York, and not far from the surgeon. We lost no time in securing an appointment, and the surgeon was prompt in decision. “The minor operation,” in which he had had no hand, was well enough as far as scalpel and probe had gone, but the seat of the malady was left untouched. There was a malignant internal growth which had already poisoned the blood. To delay a “major operation” a fortnight, would be to forfeit the one and only chance of life. It might already be too late.

In three days the almost dying man was in the Presbyterian Hospital, and under the knife.

I hasten past the month that followed. With clean blood, a temperate life, and a superb constitution as his backers, my brave husband stood once more upon his feet, and was apparently upon the highroad to recovery. When he was restored to our home-circle in season for the Christmas festivities, we rejoiced without a prevision of possible further ill from the hateful cause, now forever removed, as we fondly believed. Early in January, I had a sudden and violent hemorrhage from the lungs, superinduced, we were told by the eminent specialist summoned immediately, by the long-continued nervous strain and general weakening of the entire system.

Doctor Terhune took me to the train when I set out upon the southern trip prescribed strenuously by consulting practitioners. My dearest and faithful brother was to meet me on the last stage of my easy journey. When the late invalid waved his hat to me from the platform as the train began to move, I noted with pride and devout gratitude, how clear were his blue eyes, how healthful his complexion, and, looking back as far as I could catch sight of him, that his step had the elasticity of a boy of twenty.

He wrote daily to me, and in the old, lively fashion, for three weeks. Then a letter dictated by him to Christine told of a boil upon his wrist that hindered pen-work. I “was not to be uneasy. It was probably a wholesome working out of the virus of original sin. He would be all the better when the system was freed from it.”

I wrote at once, begging that nothing might be concealed from me, and setting a day for my return.

A telegram from my husband forbade me to stir until the time originally named as the limit of my visit. And the daily letters continued to arrive. One, I recollect, began:

“A second rising, farther up the arm, is ‘carrying on the
work of purification.’ So says the poor Pater, with a rueful
glance at his bandaged hand and arm. If it were only the
left, and not the right hand, he would not have to put up
with this unworthy amanuensis.”

Those six weeks in Richmond stand out in memory like sunlighted peaks seen between clouds that gathered below and all around it. My brother’s wife, the cherished girl-friend of our Newark life, was so far from well that we enacted the rôles of semi-invalids in company. Sometimes we breakfasted in her room, sometimes in mine, as the humor seized us. I lounged in one easy-chair, and she in another, all the forenoon, making no pretence of occupation. Had we not been straitly commanded to do nothing but get well? We drove out in company, every moderately fine day. When we tired of talking (which was seldom), we had our books. I sent to a book-store for a copy of Barrie’s _Margaret Ogilvie_—the matchless tribute of the brilliant son to the peasant woman from whom he drew all that was noblest and highest in himself—and gave it to my fellow-invalid to read. Then we talked it over—we two mothers—tenderly and happily, as befitted the parents of grown children who were fulfilling our best hopes for them. I repeated to her once, in the twilight of a winter afternoon, as we sat before the blazing fire of soft coal that tinted the far corners of the library a soft, dusky red—a stanza of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s _Rock Me to Sleep, Mother_:

“Over my heart in the days that have flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures,
Faithful unselfish, and patient like yours.”

“That is one of my husband’s favorite songs,” I said. “I often sing it to him and to Bert in the twilights at home.” And with a little laugh, I added: “My boy asked me once to emphasize ‘patient.’ He says that is the strongest characteristic of the mother’s love.”

“They repay us for it all!” was the fervent reply.

And I returned as feelingly, “Yes, a thousandfold.”

She was ever the true, unselfish woman, generous in impulse and in action, sweet and sound to the very core of her great heart. We had loved each other without a shadow of changing for over thirty years. In all our intercourse there is nothing upon which I dwell with such fondness as on the days that slipped by brightly and smoothly, that late January and early February. If I observed with regret that I rallied from my sudden seizure more rapidly than she threw off the languor and loss of appetite which, she assured us, over and over, “meant next to nothing”—I was not seriously uneasy at what I saw. She had not been strong for the last year. Time would restore her, surely. She had just arisen on the morning of my departure, when I went into her room to say, “Good-bye.” She smiled brightly as I put my arms about her and bade her, “Hurry up and return my visit.”

“You will see me before long,” she said, confidently. “As soon as I can bear the journey I shall go to Newark. My native air always brings healing on its wings.”

My beloved friend Mrs. Waite had passed from earth, six months before. The visit I paid at her house, on the way back to New York, was the first I had made there since the beauty of her presence was withdrawn.

On the morning after my arrival I had a long letter from Christine. It began ominously:

“I have a confession to make. Father has been far more
indisposed than I would let you think. Do not blame me.
I have acted under orders from him and from the doctor.
Neither would hear of your recall. Not that this relapse is
a dangerous matter. The ‘boils’ were a return of the old
trouble. He has not left his bed for a fortnight. I thought
it best to prepare you for seeing him there.”

An hour later I had a telegram from my brother:

“M. is decidedly worse. We apprehend heart-failure.”

Again I say, I would shorten the recital of how the clouds returned after the rain which we had believed would clear the atmosphere.

I was seated at the bedside of my husband, who aroused himself with difficulty to speak to me, as one shakes off a stupor, relapsing into slumber with the murmured welcome on his fevered lips, when a dispatch was brought to me from Richmond.

My sister-in-love had died that afternoon.

Five months to a day, from the beginning of my husband’s serious illness, he was brought down-stairs in the arms of a stalwart attendant, and lifted into a carriage for his first ride. We drove to the neighboring Central Park, and were threading the leafy avenues before the convalescent offered to speak. Then the tone was of one dazed into disbelief of what was before his eyes:

“The last time I was out of doors, the ground was covered with snow. I am like those that dream. I never knew until now what a beautiful place the world is!”

It was glorious in July verdure when we got him back to Sunnybank. There was no talk now of the saddle, and the briefest of drives fatigued him to faintness. Whatever the doctors might say as to the ultimate elimination of the hidden poison they had found so difficult to drive out, watchers, who had more at stake in the issue of his protracted illness, failed to see the proof that skill had effected what they claimed. After the glow of pleasure at getting home again subsided, he relapsed into the old lassitude and sad indifference to what was going on about him; his eyes were dull; his tone was lifeless; he seemed to have forgotten that he had ever had appetite for food.

At last, one day, as I sat fanning him, while he lay on the wicker sofa on the vine-clad veranda, regarding neither lake nor mountain, and smiling wanly at my chatter of the seven birds’-nests in the honeysuckle, from which the last fledgling had been coaxed away by their parents that morning—an inspiration came to me. I laid my hand on his to make sure that he would be aroused to listen, and stooped to the ear that shared in the deadening of the rest of the body.

“What do you say to going abroad again—and very soon?”

He opened his eyes wide, lifting his head to look directly at me.

“What did you say?”

I repeated the query.

He lay back with closed lids for so long I thought he was asleep. Then an echo of his own voice, as it was in the olden time, said:

“I _think_, if I could once more hear the rush of the waves against the keel of the steamer, and feel the salt air on my face, it would bring me back to life. But—where’s the use of dreaming of it? I shall never be strong enough to go on board.”

“You will, and you shall! You saved my life by taking me abroad. We will try the efficacy of your own prescription.”

I think that not one of the crowd of friends who came down to the steamer to see us off, had any hope of seeing again his living face. I heard, afterward, that they said as much among themselves, when the resolutely cheerful farewells had been spoken, and they stood watching the vessel’s slow motion out of the dock, the eyes of all fixed upon one figure recumbent in a deck-chair, a thin hand responding to the fluttering handkerchiefs above the throng on the end of the pier.

Our son was there with his betrothed, who wrote to me afterward that he was “depressed to despondency.” Belle, with her husband and boys, would occupy Sunnybank while we were away. Christine had insisted that it was not kind or safe to leave to me the sole care of the invalid. In the three weeks that elapsed between the “inspiration” and our embarkation, the brave girl had wound up all affairs that would detain her in America, and made herself and two sons ready to accompany us. The party was completed by the faithful maid who had nursed her children from infancy, and who was quite competent to aid me in nursely offices to the patient for whose sake the desperate expedition was undertaken.

He averred, in later life, that he felt an impulse of new life with the first revolution of the paddle-wheel. Certain it is that he showed signs of rallying before twenty-four hours had passed, spending all the daylight hours upon deck, and, before the voyage was half over, joining in our promenades from bow to stern. Always an excellent sailor, he drank in the sea-breeze as he might have quaffed so much nectar. The only complaint that escaped him was that, “whereas he had been promised an eleven days’ voyage, we steamed up the Clyde on the afternoon of the ninth day.”

A series of jaunts in Scotland and England was the prelude to our settling down in Florence for the winter.

Had I no other reason to urge for my deep and abiding love for that fairest and dearest of Italian cities, it would suffice me to recollect the unutterable peace and full content of that memorable half-year.

Friends, old and new, clustered about us, and lent the charm of home to the cosey apartment in Via San Giuseppe, where the gentle flow of domestic life was bright with the shining of present happiness and rekindled hope of the future. We learned to know “La Bella” at her best in those halcyon days. The boys were at a day-school; thanks to our efficient “padrona,” there were no household anxieties, and we seniors were free to enjoy to the full all that makes up the inestimable riches of the storied city.

Doctor Terhune and I claimed the privilege of convalescent and custodian, in declining to accept invitations to evening functions, thus securing opportunity for what we loved far better than the gayest of “entertainments”—long, quiet hours spent in our sitting-room “under the evening lamp,” I, busy with needle-work or knitting, while he read aloud, after the dear old fashion, works on Florentine history, art, and romance, all tending to enfold us more closely with the charméd atmosphere of the region. It would be laughable to one who has never fallen under the nameless spell of Florence to know how often, that season, we repeated aloud, as the book was laid aside for the night:

“With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.”

Letters from home were frequent and regular. Much was happening across the water while we revelled in our dreams. The Spanish War was on. It was begun and ended during our peace-fraught exile. In January, our boy took unto himself the young wife to whom he had been troth-plight for a year, and we were the easier in mind for the knowledge that this, the last of our unwedded bairns, was no longer without a home of his own.

In the spring we travelled at pleasure through Switzerland and Belgium, and so to England—my husband and I now in the _solitude à deux_ belovéd by congenial souls. Christine and her sons were left in Switzerland for a longer tour of that country.

Still wandering, lingering, and dreaming, in the long, delicious calm succeeding the darkest and stormiest period our united lives were ever to know, we revisited English villages and towns, and made acquaintance in Scotland with new and enchanting scenes, until the September day when we took passage from Glasgow for New York.

We steamed into our harbor on Sunday afternoon, just as the news of peace between the warring nations was acclaimed through the megaphone to incoming craft, and thundered from the mouths of rejoicing cannon.

XLIX

THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE—PRESENT ACTIVITIES—“LITERARY HEARTHSTONES”—GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES

AS upon our return from foreign lands nearly twenty years before this home-coming, Sunnybank was now our _pied á terre_. Our daughter, Mrs. Van de Water, and her family had occupied it during our absence. It was, therefore, not merely swept and garnished for our reception, but the spirit of Home, sweet, radiant, and indescribable, was in full possession. We were settled in the nest within an hour after we drove up to the open door. A week later, the happy circle was widened by the arrival of our son and his young wife from the Adirondacks. A second attack of appendicitis had made an operation imperatively necessary. It was performed in July, and as soon as the patient was strong enough to travel, he was sent to the mountains for recuperation. The pair were our guests for four weeks. Then they returned to town to prepare for the housekeeping upon which they had planned to enter in October. Happy letters, telling of the preparations going briskly forward, and filled with domestic details, than which nothing in the wide world was more fascinating to the little wife, reminded us of the contented cooings of mating pigeons, or, as I told the prospective housewife, of the purring of the kittens she loved to fondle under the honeysuckles of the veranda, while with us.

On October 5th an unexpected telegram brought the news of the premature birth of a baby daughter, and that “mother and child were doing well.” Four days later, a second dispatch summoned us to New York. The tiny girl was but four days old when her gentle mother passed quietly out of the life, so rich in love and hope that, up to the hour when she laid herself down cheerfully upon her couch of pain, she was, to use her own words, “almost frightened at her own happiness.”

She was married on January 10, 1898. We bore her to her last home October 12th of the same year. She sleeps in the quiet “God’s Acre,” back of the old colonial church in Pompton, in the heart of the fairest of New Jersey valleys. A peaceful spot it is, cradled by the everlasting hills. There were but three graves in our family plot when we took her there. There are five, now.

We spent that winter in the city, and our boy was again one of our small household. But for the care and the blesséd comfort of the baby daughter, the light and life of hearts and house, we might have fancied the events of the last five years a dream, and that we were once more the busy trio with whom time had sped so swiftly and brightly while “Bert” was in college. We were busy now as then. Doctor Terhune preached with tolerable regularity in different churches, and he was ever a diligent student. Bert wrought faithfully in his chosen profession of journalism, and I accepted in, 1901, the charge of a Woman’s Syndicate page established by _The North American_, in Philadelphia. I had never been idle. Month after month, work was laid to my hands that pleased my taste, and occupied all the time I could devote to literary tasks. When I agreed to take on the new burden, it was with no forecasting of what proportions it might assume.

“What do these women write to you about?” asked the proprietor of the paper under the auspices of which the syndicate was carried on.

I answered, laughingly, “Everything—from Marmalade to Matrimony.”

When he put the question, I was representing the need of an assistant, since I was getting twenty letters per diem. Four years later, a secretary and a stenographer shared the labor of keeping in touch with writers who poured in upon my desk an average mail of one hundred letters a day. Two years afterward, the average was over a thousand a week.

I have been asked often why I expend energies and fill my days in what my critics are pleased to depreciate as “hack-work.” Nobody believes my assertion that I heartily enjoy being thus brought into intimate association with the women of America. The Syndicate has extended its territory into twenty-five States, and it is still growing. Women, boys, and girls, and housefathers—no less than housemothers—tell me of their lives, their successes, their failures, their trials, and their several problems. From the mighty mass of correspondence I select letters dealing with topics of general interest, or that seem to call for free and friendly discussion, and base upon them daily articles for the Syndicate public. Thousands of letters contain stamps for replies by mail. Out of this germ of “hack-work” has grown “The Helping-Hand Club,” an informal organization, with no “plant” except my desk and the postal service that transports applications for books, magazines, and such useful articles as correspondents know will be welcome to the indigent, the shut-in, the aged, charitable societies and missions in waste places. Quietly, and without parade, our volunteer agents visit the needy, and report to us. We distribute, by correspondence, thousands of volumes and periodicals annually; we bring together supply and demand, “without money and without price,” and in ways that would appear ridiculous to some, and incredible to many.

“For Love’s Sake” is our motto, and it is caught up eagerly, from Canada to California. “The Big Family,” they call themselves—these dear co-workers of mine whose faces I shall never see on earth. When, as happens daily, I read, “Dear Mother of us all,” from those I have been permitted to help in mind, body, or estate, I thank the Master and take courage.

After eight years’ active service in the field so strangely appointed to me that I cannot but recognize (and with humble gratitude) the direct leading of the Divine Hand, I say, frankly, that I have never had such fulness of satisfaction in any other sphere of labor.

“But it is not Literature!” cried a friend to me, the other day, voicing the sentiment of many.

“No,” I answered, “but it is _Influence_, and that of the best kind.”

I have, with all this, made time—or it has been made for me—to write half a dozen books in the last ten years.

_Where Ghosts Walk_ (1898) was a joy in the writing, as was the collection of material. It reproduces for me—as I turn the pages, in maternal fashion, lingering upon a scene here, and snatching a phrase there—our strayings in storied climes, rambles into enchanted nooks untrodden by the conventional tourist, but full of mystery and charm for us. In those dim paths I still walk with the ghosts that were once visible and sentient things like ourselves.

_Literary Hearthstones_ (1899-1902) was, even more emphatically, a labor of delight. I had made studies of Charlotte Brontë and Hannah More, of John Knox and William Cowper, in the homes and haunts they glorified into shrines for the reading and the religious world. Other hallowed names are yet on my memorandum-book, and in my portfolio are the notes made in other homes and haunts, and pictures collected for the illustrations of four more volumes of the series.

If I live and hold my strength and health of body and of mind, I shall, please God, complete the tale of worthies I have singled out for study. If not—they are yet mine own brain-children. None may rob me of the pleasure of having and of holding them—until death us do part.

I should be ungrateful, and do my own feelings a wrong, were I to fail, in this connection, to acknowledge my obligations to those who kindly seconded my efforts to accumulate the material for the _Hearthstones_.

Our pilgrimages to Haworth, Olney, Wrington, and Edinburgh, are starred in the reminiscence by hospitable intent and deed, by such real sympathy in my mission, and friendly aid in the prosecution of my design, that I cannot pass them over with casual mention.

For Charlotte Brontë I had, since my early girlhood, nourished admiration that ripened into reverence, as I read with avidity every page and line relating to the marvellous sisters. I had conned her books until I knew them, from cover to cover. Her _dramatis personæ_ were friends more familiar to the dreaming girl than our next-door neighbors. It was a bitter disappointment to me that the unforeseen miscarriage of our plans frustrated my longing to go to Haworth, at our first visit to the Old World. So, when my son and I set out for our Eastern trip, Haworth stood first upon our memorandum of places that _must_ be seen in England. I had letters from four men who had engaged to facilitate my attempts to enter the Parsonage. One and all, they assured me that I would find the door inhospitably closed in my face. Nevertheless, they advised me to go to Haworth, and put up at “that resort of the thirsty—the Black Bull.” Thus one of the quartette, and who had lately published a book on the Brontës:

“The present incumbent of the parish is an ogre, a veritable dragon!” he went on to say. “He savagely refused to let me set foot upon his threshhold, and he turns hundreds of pilgrims away empty every year. But go to Haworth, by all means! Put up at the ancient hostelry; walk about the old stone house and tell well its windows, and take pleasure in Emily’s moors. The dragon has restored (?) the Brontë church, and consigned the remains of the wonderful family to a genteel crypt under the renovated pavement. All the same, go to Haworth! The hills and the moors and the heather are unchanged.”

In my _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, I have related how I fared in the pilgrimage that stands out clearly in my memory as one of the sunniest spots of that memorable seven months’ tour. I have not told how simple and direct were the means by which I gained the fulfilment of my desires. Within an hour after we had registered our names in the shabby book kept for guests and transients at the Black Bull, I wrote a note to Mr. Wade, the rector of Haworth Church, asking permission to “stand, for a few minutes, within the doors of the house that had been the home of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.” I added that I should not blame him if he objected to the intrusion of strangers upon domestic privacy.

The messenger returned speedily with word that Mr. Wade had that hour returned from London, and that he could not then write a note. He would, however, be happy to see me at the Rectory on the morrow (Sunday), and would write in the morning, naming the hour for our call. His note came while we were at breakfast, to say that he would be at liberty to receive us between services. We attended morning service, but, when it was over, refrained from making ourselves known to the rector, lingering, instead, in the church to see the tablet above the Brontë vault, and the fine window, set in the restored wall by an anonymous American, “To the glory of God, and in pleasant memory of Charlotte Brontë.” Emerging from the church, with the intention of strolling up to the Parsonage, we were met by Mr. Wade, who had gone home, expecting to find us there, and was on his way to the inn to look us up. His cordial hand-clasp and genial smile were so opposed to our preconceptions of the “dragon,” that we exchanged furtive glances of relief. He took us back to the Parsonage, and showed us everything we had wished to see, with much we had not thought of, telling us, in the same hospitable way, that, although he was the only member of the family at home that day, he would be happy to have us partake of a bachelor’s luncheon. When we declined, gratefully, he accompanied us to the church, and unlocked the case in which is kept the register of Charlotte Brontë’s marriage, signed by herself—the last time she wrote her maiden name.

Several letters passed between us, in the course of the next four years, and he opened to me, on our second visit to Haworth, in 1898, unexpected avenues of information respecting her whose biography I was writing, which were of incalculable value to me. When he retired from the active duties of his profession to Hurley, in another county, he wrote to me a long, interesting letter, enclosing a copy of the resolutions passed by the Yorkshire parish he had served faithfully for forty-seven years.

Besides the precious stock of building “material” for the construction of my story of Charlotte, which I could have gained in no other way than through his kindly offices, this odd friendship taught me a lesson of faith in my kind, and of distrust of hearsay evidence and of popular disfavor, that will last me forever. I dedicated the biography to “Rev. J. Wade, for forty-seven years incumbent of Haworth, in cordial appreciation of the unfailing courtesy and kindly aid extended by him to the American stranger within his gates.”

A dedication that brought me many letters of surprised dissent from English and American tourists, and writers whose experience was less pleasant than my own. I tell the tale, in brief, as an act of simple justice to a much-abused man.

“You have been told that I am a vandal and a bear,” he said to me on that Sunday. “I found church and Parsonage almost in ruins. I was not appointed to this parish as the curator of a museum, but to do my best for the cure of souls. When I tell you that, for ten years after Mr. Brontë’s death, the average number of sight-seers who called at the Parsonage was three thousand a year, and that they still mount up to a third of that number, you may be more lenient in judgment than the touring public and the press proved themselves to be.”

From Rev. Mr. Langley—incumbent of Olney, and resident in the quaintly beautiful parsonage that was the home of Lady Austin, Cowper’s friend and disciple—we met with courtesy as fine. And in seeking details of Hannah More’s private life, I found an able and enthusiastic assistant in Rev. Mr. Wright, of Wrington, in the church-yard of which the “Queen of Barleywood” is buried.

Cherished reminiscences are these, which neither the mists of years nor the clouds of sorrow have dimmed. In dwelling upon them, as I near the close of my annals of an every-day woman’s life, I comprehend what the Psalmist meant when he said, “They have been my song in the house of my pilgrimage.”

Perhaps I erred in writing, “every-day life.” Or, it may be because so few women have recorded the lights and shadows of their lives as frankly and as fully as I am doing, that I am asking myself whether it may not be that the chequered scene I survey from the hill-top—which gives me on clear days a fine view of the Delectable Mountains—has been exceptionally eventful, as it has been affluent in God’s choicest gifts of home-joys and home-loves, and in opportunities of proving, by word and in deed, my love for fellow-travellers along the King’s Highway.

The reader who has followed me patiently, because sympathetically, from the beginning of the narrative, will comprehend, through the depth of that sympathy, why I now leave to other pens the recital of what remains to be said. The hands that guided the pen were tender of touch, the hearts were true that dictated the report of the Golden Wedding and the abstract of a noble life, now developing throughout the ages into the stature of the Perfect Man. The voluntary tributes they combined to offer are dear beyond expression, to wife and children and to a great host of friends.