Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/268

Rh the other"—Here her voice failed through weakness. Undoubtedly she meant that with the other hand she had worked to get the women their rights.

To the last she went on with the same two-fold line of thought, planning for the comfort of her family and the carrying on of the household after she should be gone, and also planning for the carrying on of the suffrage work and of the Woman’s Journal "the dear little old Woman's Journal,'^ as she called the paper into which she had put so much of her heart and life.

The last letter but one that she wrote was to a prominent Colorado woman, commending Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt to her, and earnestly asking her to help the passage of the pending suffrage amendment. The last letter of all was written to her only surviving-brother, twelve years her senior. When he came to see her during her last illness, he said to her with tears, "You have always been more like a mother than a sister to me."

On October 18 she passed quietly away. On the last afternoon she looked at me and seemed to wish to say something. I put my ear to her lips. She said distinctly, "Make the world better." They were almost her last articulate words.

Always very modest in her estimate of herself, she had told her family that it would not be worth while to have the funeral in a church: there would not be enough people who would care to come. A silent and sorrowing crowd filled the street before the Church of the Disciples long before the doors were opened, and eleven hundred people listened to the tributes paid her by some of the noblest men and women of America. By her own wish there was nothing lugubrious about the funeral: every thing was cheerful and simple. By her own request, also, the service included the reading of two poems of Whittier's, containing the lines:—

and

Even the newspapers, those that had always opposed equal rights for women, heaped praises upon her; and a lifelong adversary of hers said, "The death of no woman in America has ever called out so widespread a tribute, of affection and esteem."

She had not the smallest thirst for fame .. It has been hard to compile any adequate account of her life, because she kept no record of her work, never cared to preserve her press notices, and refused, almost with horror, all requests from publishers of books about "famous women" to furnish material for a biographical sketch of herself. She thought it hardly worth while that and account of her should ever be written. Yet this very fact, while it greatly increases the difficulties of her biographer, is perhaps in itself the strongest testimony to the spirit in which she did her work. During her last illness she took pleasure in the following lines, which she had clipped from some newspaper: —

LICE WAKEFIELD EMERSON, teacher, was born in Oakham, Mass., May 19, 1840, daughter of Horace Poole and Abigail (Pratt) Wakefield. She comes of good New England ancestry. Her paternal grandfather. Deacon Caleb Wakefield, son of Timothy and Susanna (Bancroft) Wakefield, was born April 18, 1785, at Reading, Mass., and died in that town, March 4, 1876. He married, first, Matilda, daughter of Jonathan and Ann (Bancroft) Poole, who was