Mothers’ Meetings,” which had been suggested to her mind by visits to Liverpool.  The sight of a baby patient in the Children’s Hospital there, who had been paralyzed and made speechless by fright, but who took so strange a fancy to my sister’s sympathetic face that he held her hand and could scarcely be induced to release it, had affected her deeply.  So did a visit that she paid one Sunday to the Seamen’s Orphanage, where she heard the voices of hundreds of fatherless children ascending with one accord in the words, “I will arise and go to my Father,” and realized the Love that watched over them.  These scenes were both to have been woven into the tale, and the “Little Mothers” were boy nurses of baby brothers and sisters.

Another phase of sailor life on which Julie hoped to write was the “Guild of Merchant Adventurers of Bristol.”  She had visited their quaint Hall, and collected a good deal of historical information and local colouring for the tale, and its lesson would have been one on mercantile honour.

I hope I have kept my original promise, that whilst I was making a list of Julie’s writings, I would also supply an outline biography of her life; but now, if the Children wish to learn something of her at its End, they shall be told in her own words:—­

Madam Liberality grew up into much the same sort of person that she was when a child.  She always had been what is termed old-fashioned, and the older she grew the better her old-fashionedness became her, so that at last her friends would say to her, “Ah, if we all wore as well as you do, my dear!  You’ve hardly changed at all since we remember you in short petticoats.”  So far as she did change, the change was for the better. (It is to be hoped we do improve a little as we get older.) She was still liberal and economical.  She still planned and hoped indefatigably.  She was still tender-hearted in the sense in which Gray speaks—­

    “To each his sufferings:  all are men
      Condemned alike to groan,
    The tender for another’s pain,
      The unfeeling for his own.”

She still had a good deal of ill-health and ill-luck, and a good deal of pleasure in spite of both.  She was happy in the happiness of others, and pleased by their praise.  But she was less head-strong and opinionated in her plans, and less fretful when they failed.  It is possible, after one has cut one’s wisdom-teeth, to cure oneself even of a good deal of vanity, and to learn to play the second fiddle very gracefully; and Madam Liberality did not resist the lessons of life.

GOD teaches us wisdom in divers ways.  Why He suffers some people to have so many troubles, and so little of what we call pleasure in this world, we cannot in this world know.  The heaviest blows often fall on the weakest shoulders, and how these endure and bear up under them is another of the things which GOD knows better than we.