“W.  B.

     “The Chief of the Staff.”

To his second daughter, in command of The Army in the United States, his last letter read as follows:—­

     “July 20, 1912.

     “My dear, dear Eva,—­

“I had your letter.  Bless you a thousand times!  You are a lovely correspondent.  You don’t write your letters with your pen, or with your tongue, you write them with your heart.  Hearts are different; some, I suppose, are born sound and musical, others are born uncertain and unmusical, and are at best a mere tinkling cymbal.  Yours, I have no doubt, has blessed and cheered and delighted the soul of the mother who bore you from the very first opening of your eyes upon the world, and that dear heart has gone on with that cheering influence from that time to the present, and it will go on cheering everybody around you who have loved you, and it will go on cheering among the rest your loving brother Bramwell and your devoted General right away to the end; nay, will go on endlessly, for there is to be no conclusion to our affection.

“I want it to be so.  I want it to be my own experience.  Love, to be a blessing, must be ambitious, boundless, and eternal.  O Lord, help me! and O Lord, destroy everything in me that interferes with the prosperity, growth, and fruitfulness of this precious, Divine, and everlasting fruit!

“I have been ill—­I have been very ill indeed.  I have had a return of my indigestion in its most terrible form.  This spasmodic feeling of suffocation has so distressed me that at times it has seemed almost impossible for me to exist.  Still, I have fought my way through, and the doctors this afternoon have told me, as bluntly and plainly as an opinion could be given to a man, that I must struggle on and not give way, or the consequences will be very serious.

“Then, too, the eye has caused me much pain, but that has very much, if not entirely, passed off, and the oculist tells me that the eye will heal up.  But, alas! alas!  I am absolutely blind.  It is very painful, but I am not the only blind man in the world, and I can easily see how, if I am spared, I shall be able to do a good deal of valuable work.

“So I am going to make another attempt at work.  What do you think of that?  I have sat down this afternoon, not exactly to the desk, but any way to the duties of the desk, and I am going to strive to stick to them if I possibly can.  I have been down to some of my meals; I have had a walk in the garden, and now it is proposed for me to take a drive in a motor, I believe some kind soul is loaning me.  Anyhow, I am going to have some machine that will shuffle me along the street, road, and square, and I will see how that acts on my nerves, and then perhaps try something more.

     “However, I am going into action once more in the Salvation War,
     and I believe, feeble as I am, God is going to give me another good
     turn, and another blessed wave of success.