of Christ, adoring Him as the Image of the Invisible God, and (accepting and rejoicing in) all that comes from believing this.'

-a

Her husband, having retired from his professorship, was now busying himself in collecting the literature of 'Spiritualism' subject which had always for him a peculiar fascination. Here the comment of Mrs. Stowe was of a nature calculated to be most salutary over many minds who might be tempted into folly and irreverence in this direction.

Speaking of the secrets of the grave she writes: 'Would it were, indeed so, that the walls between the spiritual and material were growing thin, and that communion with the departed blest shall be among the privileges and possibilities of this our mortal state! But for us the stone must be rolled away by an unquestionable angel whose " countenance is as the lightning," who executes no doubtful juggle by pale moonlight or starlight, but rolls back the stone in fair, open morning, and sits on it. Then could we bless God for His mighty gift, and with love, awe and reverence take up that blessed fellowship with another life, and weave it reverently and trustingly into the web of our daily course.'

In 1872, Mrs. Stowe was prevailed upon by the 'Boston Literary Bureau' to give a series of public readings from her works in some of the leading cities of the States.' Her appearance in this capacity was warmly welcomed, and her work was highly successful. But after a year or two of occasional efforts the enterprise was found to be too trying to her health, and was accordingly given up, and with the exception of a reading now and then on behalf of some specially deserving charity' was not resumed.

An outburst' of popular favour awaited her on occasion of her seventieth birth-day, June 14, 1882. In response to a wide-spread desire for some marked observance, her publishers arranged a 'gardenparty' and reception at Newtonville, Boston, which was attended by two hundred of the most distinguished literary men and women of the day.' An address was presented to Mrs. Stowe, and some lines by John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet. In reply, she said, 'I thank all my friends from my heart-that is all. And one thing more, and that is if any of you have any doubt, or sorrow, or pain in this world, just remember what God has done; just remember that the great sorrow of slavery has gone-gone by for ever. Let us never doubt. Everything that ought to happen is going to happen.' A little earlier than the date of this birth-day Mrs. Stowe had been selecting her letters and papers for the use of her biographer, and remarked to her son how affecting it was to read them again'letters of the loved friends who had already gone from earth full

of the warm, eager, anxious, busy life that is for ever past. I thank God there is one thing running through all of them from the time I was thirteen years old, and that is the intense, unwavering sense of Christ's educating, guiding presence and care. It is all that remains

now.

6.66

'Through life and through death, through sorrowing, through sinning,
Christ shall suffice me as He hath sufficed.
Christ is the end and Christ the beginning,

The beginning and end of all is Christ."

Mrs. Stowe lived after this in retirement in her own home-circle, a retirement which deepened with her increasing years and the death of near and dear kindred. A peculiarly brilliant gathering celebrated her eighty-fourth birth-day in the year 1895 at Hartford, Connecticut, when she received numerous congratulatory letters, including many from England and other European countries.

On June 26, 1896, she was seized with paralysis, and lingered until July, 1, when she died in her eighty-sixth year.

JAMES CUNNINGHAM, M.A.

MRS. SEWELL.

M

I.

EARLY CHILDHOOD.

RS. SEWELL was born in 1797, at Sutton in Suffolk, where her father, Mr. Wright, a farmer of good means and position, then lived, though he moved before she was two years old to another farm at Felthorpe, six miles from Norwich.

To the day of her death she cherished the most reverential love and admiration for him, and this was mainly the cause of her writing in old age and widowhood the charming autobiography in the shape of a letter to her grandchildren, which begins the Life written by Mrs. Bailey, from which the incidents of this sketch are by kind permission taken.' 'I want to immortalise him in the memory of his descendants,' she writes; and truly she has done so.

The ancestors both of her father and mother had been Friends in the time of the Commonwealth, when George Fox was a preacher. Her father was sent to learn farming with John Holmes, of Tivetshall, in Norfolk, and there met his future wife, Anne, one of the daughters. They were married when she was twenty, and he two years older.

Felthorpe was one of the poorest farms in Norfolk, but it was a children's paradise-so at least Mary (Mrs. Sewell) and her brother and sister found it. The sundew, the maiden's hair, the bog pimpernel, the grass of Parnassus, with many heaths, were to be found on the common and swamps, where the cry of the curlew was heard.' They modelled from the clay of the sand-pits 'with more enjoyment than Palissy.' And there were the high woods with the first primroses and violets, and a certain ditch which was a very delightful place for making bowers to sit in; we used to arch them over, and then make our roof of ivy. My father would help, and seem to enjoy it all as much as we did.'

Then there was a fruit-garden and orchard, in which with certain restraints, understood and obeyed, they were free to enjoy the fruit;

The Life of Mrs. Sewell. By Mrs. Bailey. J. Nisbet & Co., London. New edition now published at 3s. 6d.

there were no perplexing laws to provoke us to break them.' And in this orchard Mary and her younger sister, Elizabeth, performed their 'first charity.' 'A very poor family had moved into the village, and my father did all he could to find the man and his family employment. He ordered one of the boys, about twelve, to come and dig a deep hole in the orchard. Our sympathies were much stirred for these poor people, especially for this boy, and we consulted together how we could give him a little of our money. Our income was a penny a week. We were too delicate of his feelings to offer it as charity, so we went and stood by the hole he was digging, and as it were accidentally dropped our pence into it, and when he picked them up to return to us, we said, "Oh no, it was of no consequence!

They had each one sheep of their own, and at sheep-shearing they received market price for the fleece; and in the early morning they had the delight of gathering locks of wool from the bushes where the sheep had passed to the shearing. Oh, kings' daughters,' she says, 'what have they equal to this delight? And then fresh home to breakfast on our bread and milk, sweetened by our father's exhilarating pleasure in our success.'

The harvest time was a season of great joy-the harvest dinners, and, when the fields were cleared, the great harvest supper. The last waggon full of corn was adorned with branches of trees and drawn into the yard; 'then all the labourers went home and dressed themselves in their best to come with their wives to the harvest supper. Everything was well cooked in my mother's house,' writes Mrs. Sewell, and the harvest cakes were better than I have ever been able to make since. Of course they had the dew of youth upon them.'

Truly the farmer's wife in those days held no sinecure position. The men slept and were boarded in the house. So the mother had no time for teaching her children, and Mary and Elizabeth began their education in a dame school, to which they were driven every day 'by the boy,' while their elder brother John was sent to the best school within reach. Afterward a bright young governess' came to teach the girls, Anna (the eldest), Mary and Elizabeth, and they got other educational advantages.

But this idyllic life was soon to pass.

Mr. Wright decided on giving up the farm and joining a ship-owner at Yarmouth. There was an auction of the farming stock. Her father's anxious, 'almost agonized look' struck to Mary's heart when he saw his beautiful farm-horses and other stock selling far below their value. The old perennial sunshine ceased that day.

II.

REMOVAL TO YARMOUTH.

THERE were several Friends' families in Yarmouth, with whom they were soon on sociable terms, all in trade and thoroughly respectable.' William Sewell and his wife were the leading Friends in the meeting. "The opinion of Quaker Sewell,' says his future daughter-in-law, 'had great weight. His wife was an Elder, and kept her eye jealously on us, lest we should lead the other young Friends out of the way of plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel.' Following on this comes an amusing anecdote of four cloth pelisses ordered by the mother for her four girls (Anna was seventeen, Mary not thirteen, the other two eleven and nine respectively) of a very pretty sage green colour with capes, and unfortunately trimmed around these capes with the collars and wrists by swan's-down,' which made the pelisses not only very pretty but very striking when worn by four girls. The meeting received a shock, the 'dear Elder' (Mrs. Sewell) passed them without speaking, calling afterwards to remonstrate so earnestly, that, overcome with the fear of her girls becoming a stumbling-block to others, Mrs. Wright-much to their disgust-sent back the pelisses to have the swan's-down removed.

worse.

Eight years passed, bringing many trials; the marriage of her elder brother, John, seems to have been the only bright event they brought, and Mary spares a page to describe the sweet unselfishness and intellectual charm of her sister-in-law, who appears also to have had both fortune and position. But her father's affairs went from bad to He had embarked in the management of the first river steampacket in England, which was placed by his brother Richard on the Yarmouth river to run between Yarmouth and Norwich. His resources were drained by the dishonesty of another, resulting in his ruin. Life had to begin again. Anna and Mary consulted anxiously as to how they could best help the burdens, at first scarcely able to see their way. Isaac Sewell wanted Mary to begin life with him when she was between seventeen and eighteen, but she was not so minded,' and it ended in her obtaining a situation in a school in Essex as governess, and Anna and Elizabeth as teachers in the families of Friends. The girls had brave hearts, making ourselves merry,' Mary writes, 'when we met, or wrote, over little things; while at home the way was very clouded.'

Her brother John came to the help of his parents, establishing them in a small farm at Buxton in Norfolk.