Page:Letters of Life.djvu/35

Rh an early friend. Respect to her virtues was paid by those whom she had so long and so faithfully served. Great kindness of heart had she for sickness and sorrow; and to claims of charity, and especially those from her own poor relatives, her liberality was free and untiring. By prudence in preserving the surplus of her wages, she had secured an independence, and, after the death of the beloved benefactors under whose roof for almost half a century she had dwelt, returned to beautiful Norwich, to be solaced by the nursing care of her kindred.

There she was provided and attended like any lady of the land; for she lived upon the income of her own money, and was a devisor by will and testament of legacy and donation. There I sometimes saw her, in great comfort, sleeping in a large apartment hung with pictures, and the small bed of a nursing relative near her own, lest she might want aid in the night.

When I saw her for the last time, shortly before her death, she was on the verge of her eighty-fifth year. I had heard that she mourned after me, and wondered why I so neglected to call, thinking, in her brokenness of mind, that I was still a neighbor. When I told her that I had come by the railroad forty miles since dinner, and ere tea-time should return home, making eighty miles in all on purpose to see her, she seemed bewildered. Intellectual memory slumbered, but the memory of the heart was wakeful.