instead of war, and perhaps, therefore, appeals rather less deeply to general sympathies; but I fully agree with a noted artist friend, who, when writing to regret my sister’s death, said, “‘Jackanapes’ and ‘Daddy Darwin’ I have never been able to read without tears, and hope I never may.”  Daddy had no actual existence, though his outward man may have been drawn from types of a race of “old standards” which is fast dying out.  The incident of the theft and recovery of the pigeons is a true one, and happened to a flock at the old Hall farm near our home, which also once possessed a luxuriant garden, wherein Phoebe might have found all the requisites for her Sunday posy.  A “tea” for the workhouse children used to be Madam Liberality’s annual birthday feast; and the spot where the gaffers sat and watched the “new graft” strolling home across the fields was so faithfully described by Julie from her favourite Schroggs Wood, that when Mr. Caldecott reproduced it in his beautiful illustration, some friends who were well acquainted with the spot, believed that he had been to Ecclesfield to paint it.

[Illustration:  ECCLESFIELD HALL]

Julie’s health became somewhat better in 1882, and for the Magazine this year she wrote as a serial tale “Laetus Sorte Mea; or, the Story of a Short Life.”  This was not republished as a book until four days before my sister’s death, and it has become so well known from appearing at this critical time that I need say very little about it.  A curious mistake, however, resulted from its being published then, which was that most of the reviewers spoke of it as being the last work that she wrote, and commented on the title as a singularly appropriate one, but those who had read the tale in the Magazine were aware that it was written three years previously, and that the second name was put before the first, as it was feared the public would be perplexed by a Latin title.  The only part of the book that my sister added during her illness was Leonard’s fifth letter in Chapter X. This she dictated, because she could not write.  She had intended to give Saint Martin’s history when the story came out in the Magazine, but was hindered by want of space.[32] Many people admire Leonard’s story as much as that of Jackanapes, but to me it is not quite so highly finished from an artistic point of view.  I think it suffered a little from being written in detachments from month to month.  It is, however, almost hypercritical to point out defects, and the circumstances of Leonard’s life are so much more within the range of common experiences than those of Jackanapes, it is probable that the lesson of the Short Life, during which a V.C. was won by the joyful endurance of inglorious suffering, may be more helpful to general readers than that of the other brief career, in which Jackanapes, after “one crowded hour of glorious life,” earned his crown of victory.

[Footnote 32:  Letter, Oct. 5, 1882.]