Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/379

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

��1817, and his death in 1868." He died suddenly in his own garden, in the manner in which his son died forty years later. Three weeks previously he had received the news of the death of his son Charles, by a fall of two hundred feet in Australia at the early age of thirty-four. This shock caused his death. Ebs worth, writing to Mr. Arthur Hill in reference to it on the 22nd March, 1902, states "The only thing my father dreaded, in his eightieth year, was a partial death of mind while body lingered, or of stricken body with an absent mind. He had been wonderfully robust until the stroke came to him, after sunset on the fifty-first anniversary of his birthday, and the fiftieth birthday of his eldest child Emilie Co well." He had been reading Alexander Smith's beautiful essay ' On Death and Dying,' and marked the closing lines with a sprig of flowers. On the Sunday following, his own music was played and sung in churches of all denominations in Edinburgh. No complete list of his writings can be obtained ; his son has named some of them in the biography he wrote for the ' Dictionary of National Biography.' Many of his MSS., beautifully written, are now in my possession. He did indeed leave sweet memories to all who knew him, especially to those nearest to him.

In the June of the year following the widow wrote from Edin- burgh to the lady in Australia who had been engaged to her dead son :

MY DEAR YOUNG FRIEND, Had our dear Charles lived, I should have been privileged to have addressed you by a nearer and dearer title, that of his wife and my daughter. I loved my boy ; he was but a boy when he left his home in 1852 as such he lived in my remembrance, and in that of his dear father. The shock of learning the sudden and irremediable loss we had sustained was too much for the father, who was always hoping to see him.

And did 7 not feel that loss ? Oh, yes, for it was to me, his mother, that all his letters and papers were addressed. I would be and he humoured my foible Al with him. I had to strive against my own grief, to endeavour to impart comfort to his sorrow- ing father, in which I was materially assisted by my eldest son (the Rev. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth, M.A.), who hurried from England immediately upon receiving the, to us all, sad intelligence, and did not leave his father until his filial attentions, his consoling assurance .... enabled us to say, "Thy will, O Lord, not mine, be done." You will have learnt that the father and son, who had been all in all to each other, who were as brothers, companions, and friends, never met again in life.

Again my eldest son was summoned from England. Again he hurried here, to pay the last sad duties to his dear father, and comfort, if comfort could be afforded to, his widowed mother. It was his desire and that of his dear good wife that I should return

��Death of

Joseph

Ebsworth.

��Mrs.

Ebsworth's

letter to her

son Charles's

betrothed.

�� �