On one of Julie’s last days she expressed a fear to her doctor that she was very impatient under her pain, and he answered, “Indeed you are not; I think you deserve a Victoria Cross for the way in which you bear it.”  This reply touched her very much, for she knew the speaker had not read Leonard’s Story; and we used to hide the proof-sheets of it, for which she was choosing head-lines to the pages, whenever her doctors came into the room, fearing that they would disapprove of her doing any mental work.

In the volume of Aunt Judy for 1883 “A Happy Family” appeared, but this had been originally written for an American Magazine, in which a prize was offered for a tale not exceeding nine hundred words in length.  Julie did not gain the prize, and her story was rather spoiled by having to be too closely condensed.

She also wrote three poems for Aunt Judy in 1883, “The Poet and the Brook,” “Mother’s Birthday Review,” and “Convalescence.”  The last one and the tale of “Sunflowers and a Rushlight” (which came out in November 1883) bear some traces of the deep sympathy she had learned for ill health through her own sufferings of the last few years; the same may, to some extent, be said of “The Story of a Short Life.”  “Mother’s Birthday Review” does not come under this heading, though I well remember that part, if not the whole of it, was written whilst Julie lay in bed; and I was despatched by her on messages in various directions to ascertain what really became of Hampstead Heath donkeys during the winter, and the name of the flower that clothes some parts of the Heath with a sheet of white in summer.

In May 1883, Major Ewing returned home from Ceylon, and was stationed at Taunton.  This change brought back much comfort and happiness into my sister’s life.  She once more had a pretty home of her own, and not only a home but a garden.  When the Ewings took their house, and named it Villa Ponente from its aspect towards the setting sun, the “garden” was a potato patch, with soil chiefly composed of refuse left by the house-builders; but my sister soon began to accumulate flowers in the borders, especially herbaceous ones that were given to her by friends, or bought by her in the market.  Then in 1884 she wrote “Mary’s Meadow,” as a serial for Aunt Judy’s Magazine, and the story was so popular that it led to the establishment of a “Parkinson Society for lovers of hardy flowers.”  Miss Alice Sargant was the founder and secretary of this, and to her my sister owed much of the enjoyment of her life at Taunton, for the Society produced many friends by correspondence, with whom she exchanged plants and books, and the “potato patch” quickly turned into a well-stocked flower-garden.

Perhaps the friend who did most of all to beautify it was the Rev, J. Going, who not only gave my sister many roses, but planted them round the walls of her house himself, and pruned them afterwards, calling himself her “head gardener.”  She did not live long enough to see the roses sufficiently established to flower thoroughly, but she enjoyed them by anticipation, and they served to keep her grave bright during the summer that followed her death.