years. I do not suppose that time will ever entirely heal the deep wound, but I trust the sharpness of suffering will subside sufficiently to enable me to be of some use during the - remainder of the time that remains to me in this world. I cannot solve the problem of this world, except by supposing it to be a primary school for another; but that other world seems too far off, and the conditions of existence there too vague, to be positive relief from the loneliness of separation. I can only wait and trust."

"Wait and trust," she did, but for a time life was become a hard struggle. "People are very kind, but I cannot banish the desolate feeling that I belong to nobody and nobody belongs to me," she tells a friend during the year following her husband's death. Such recognition of loneliness is the almost inevitable fate of one or other of a childless pair, who, for a long term of years, have been all in all to each other. Mrs. Child had never a son or daughter of her own, though, as some one said, "a great many of other people's."

Calmness and comfort came with time and with the ministrations of the many friends who surrounded her. Her last book, "Aspirations of the World," a volume of selections on moral and religious subjects, was published in 1878.

On the morning of October 20, 1880, she died, after a few brief moments of suffering. The generous heart which had beat with all the strongest pulses of her century had at last expended its force, and peacefully and easily the end came.

The funeral was, as befitted one like her, plain and simple. Mr. Whittier tells us: "The pall-bearers were elderly, plain farmers in the neighborhood, and led by the old white-haired undertaker, the procession wound its way to the not distant burial-ground over the red and gold of fallen leaves, and under the half-covered October sky. Just after her body was consigned to the earth a magnificent rainbow spanned, with its arc of glory, the eastern sky."

We can hardly close this little sketch more fittingly than with the beautiful words added to her recently published Correspondence" by Mr. Wendell Phillips:

er

"A dear, lovable woman, welcome at a sick bedside; as much in place there as when facing an angry nation; contented with the home she had made. A wise counsellor, one who made your troubles hers, and pondered thoughtfully before she spoke her hearty word. She was the kind of woman one would choose to represent woman's entrance into broader life. Modest, womanly, sincere, simple, solid, real, loyal, to be trusted; equal to affairs, and yet above them; mother wit ripened by careful training and enriched by the lore of ages; a hand ready for fireside help and a mystic loving to wander on the edge of the actual, reaching out up into the infinite and the unfathomable, so that life was lifted to romance, to heroism, and to loftiest faith."

16

CHAPTER XI.

MARY CLEMMER.

BY LILIAN WHITING.

Mary Clemmer's Ancestry-Pen-portraits of Her Father and Mother-Her Childhood School-life and Early Education-Publishing Her First Verses- Beginning Her Literary Career-Removal to New York - First Newspaper Letters - Marvellous Industry and Capacity for WorkContracting to Write a Column a Day for Three Years-A Chapter from Her Experiences During the War-Vivid Description of the Surrender of Maryland Heights-Her Journalistic Work - How She Gathers Materials for "A Woman's Letter from Washington"-Charles Sumner's Friendship-A Busy Life-Sought and Caressed by Society-Tribute to the Memory of Alice and Phoebe Cary.

MONG the women of letters in our own country,

few have appealed to the public by work that has attracted so wide a personal response as has Mary Clemmer.

In 1866 she inaugurated an original and specific line of journalistic work that at once fixed public attention. Thousands of families became subscribers to the "New York Independent" when that journal began the publication of "A Woman's Letter from Washington." Mary Clemmer's first letter to the "Independent" was written March 4, 1866. In the years that have passed between that date and the present, Mrs. Clemmer has become widely known as a poet and novelist; yet it is as the fine interpreter of the important phases of Washington life through an eventful series of years that we see her most distinctive work. Her letters from the Capital have always been significant of fine perception, wide comprehension, and a refined insight into the subtle relations and the undercurrents of human life. Strong in their political characterization, these letters have been a potent

force in the shaping of national issues by their power to influence public opinion.

Her

Mary Clemmer was born in Utica, New York. father, Abraham Clemmer, a native of Pennsylvania, was of Huguenot descent. Her mother, Margaret Kneale, was born in the Isle of Man.

The Clemmer family trace their origin to Alsatia, France, on the borders of Germany. Their name in the fatherland was spelled Klemmer. In 1685, when Louis XIV. pushed his persecutions of the Huguenots past the borders of France into the very heart of Germany, the Clemmer family were among the million Huguenots who then fled from their native soil to seek refuge in strange lands. They settled in Berks county, Pennsylvania, before the American Revolution. Jonas Clemmer, the father of Abraham Clemmer, an educated man, a teacher by profession, died when his son was but five years of age- his death changing the entire earthly destiny of his child.

The mother of Abraham Clemmer, born Barbara Schelley, came also from Huguenot stock. The male members of her family for many generations had been practitioners of medicine, or professors of medical science. Her brothers were educated as physicians, and their sons to-day are practising physicians in the State of Pennsylvania. She, a girl, denied the liberal education bestowed upon her brothers, possessed in no less degree than they the instinct of healing. With none of the training that bestows a college diploma she became famous in the country surrounding her home for her knowledge of medicines, her skill in using them, and in healing the sick. A woman of magnificent constitution, of great force of character, of profound sweetness of disposition, she died in the homestead in Pennsylvania, where she lived from her youth, as late as the year 1873, aged eightytwo years.

The early death of his father, with the burden that death cast upon his mother of caring for a growing family, were, together, the causes which denied to Abraham Clemmer the

liberal education, the thorough mental discipline, which, up to his time, had been the birthright of his family.

In response to a request from the writer of this sketch, Mary Clemmer writes of her father:

"The first memory I recall of the aspect of my father was when I was five years old. They placed me in a high chair at the tea-table, and instead of eating, I sat gazing at my father, because to my child's vision he looked so handsome. My first outburst of grief I recall at the same table, when a person told me that some time my father's raven hair would be gray. The announcement to me was so terrible I burst into tears. "Abraham Clemmer carried in his bearing and on his face the visible stamp of a superior race. He was of fine stature, with an alert step and a haughty poise of the head. His features were patrician in outline and expression. His head high, his hair black and curling, his brows arched, his hazel eyes dark and full, his nose finely aquiline, his mouth as exquisitely cut as Apollo's, with the suggestion of disdain in its curves, yet full of sweetness. This was the beauty of his prime. In old age, in its patriarchal aspect, it became still more uncommon, and in death was so remarkable that those who had never seen him in life, looking upon him in his last sleep, robed for the grave, recall his face to-day, with the seal of ineffable peace upon it, as one of the most nobly beautiful that they had ever gazed upon in death.

"He had the temperament of the poet. He loved Nature with that passion which finds in her presence perpetual satisfaction and solace. He loved beauty with the fine fervor that makes its love religion. He loved music with an enthusiasm that was in itself an inspiration. He wrote with great elegance, drew with remarkable accuracy and facility a natural linguist.

was

"With due opportunity he would have excelled as an artist, or have succeeded in any profession demanding the development of the finest mental faculties. What in his whole life he never attained was the power of calculation indispensable to merely material success.