Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/370

 350 and Travel), now invested with a mournful interest as her last utterance. In March, 1900, she went to South Africa, with no definite work, but hoping to do some good, and thence perhaps go to the West Coast again. Nursing the sick Boers near Cape Town, she was cut off by fever on June 3rd, only two months after landing, and, to crown her life of unselfish self-sacrifice, was buried at sea by her own desire. Her frank fearlessness, her sincerity, and tender heart, her modesty, illumined by delightful humour, made up a rare character, whose influence was far-reaching, and was most precious to her friends.

"A woman of genius, whose lovable and guileless nature, whose powers of tender sympathy and generous insight were only equalled by her daring as a traveller and explorer, and by her gifts as a writer—Mary Kingsley, the heir and sustainer of a great name, one of the ablest of that remarkable band of wandering writers, men and women, who are the eyes and ears to-day of our nascent Empire, who are bringing home to England ' that weary Titan,' her tasks, her faults, her problems—endowed with humour, with vision, with that light and laughing temper which sends home the shafts of knowledge and of feeling, and with a passion for justice which was in its roots also a passion for England—Mary Kingsley has gone from us. To the service of those poor feverstricken prisoners from Paardeberg she has given her life, so precious, so full still of unexhausted power—flung it away, some people might contend, in an enterprise and a service that others with gifts less rare and less irreplaceable might have rendered. But!—it is from such waste that our wealth flows—from such giving that our hearts, sore as they may be, are shamed and fired afresh. These true knights-errant of intelligence and pity, who think no travail of mind and body too great to face, if only they may come at the truth and tell it—who wander, suffer, laugh, and learn—who make a new wisdom, often in the teeth of the old, which becomes the wisdom of their fellows—it is of them that we may say —

,

At the Women Writers Dinner, 1900.

By kind permission of the Editors of the "Churchwoman"