In attempting to give a description of your dear mother's fine character, I cannot omit her splendid courage. I have referred to it as shown on the sea. You who have followed her with the hounds, as long as she had strength to sit in the saddle, will never forget her pluck and skill. Her courage never failed her. It upheld her undaunted through many illnesses.
And now I turn to that part of the work of her life by which your dear mother is best known to the outer world. Her books were widely read by English-speaking people, and have been translated into the language of nearly every civilised nation. The books grew out of a habit, early adopted when on her travels, of sitting up in bed as soon as she awoke in the morning, in her dressing-jacket, and writing with pencil and paper an unpretending narrative of the previous day's proceedings, to be sent home to her father. The written letter grew into the lithographed journal, and the latter into the printed book, at first prepared for private circulation, and finally, on completion of our voyage round the world, for publication. The favourable reception of the first book was wholly unexpected by the writer. She awoke and found herself famous.
Her popularity as a writer has been won by means the simplest, the purest, and most natural which can be conceived. Not a single unkind or ungenerous thought is to be found in any book of hers. The instruction and knowledge conveyed, if not profound, are useful and interesting to readers of all classes. The choice of topics is always judicious. A bright and happy spirit glows in her pages, and it is this which makes the books attractive to all classes. They were read with pleasure by Prince Bismarck, as he smoked his evening pipe, as well as by girls at school. Letters of acknowledgment used to reach your mother from the bedside of the aged and the sick, from the prairies of America, the backwoods of Canada, and the lonely sheep-stations of Australia. Those grateful letters were the most valued which were received from the cottages of the poor. As old George Herbert sings,
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Scorn no man's love, though of a mean degree; Love is a present for a mighty King. |
It was natural that your mother, with her eager nature, should be spurred on to renewed efforts by success. She set out on her last journey full of hope and enterprise. In India, in Borneo, in Australia, she was resolved to leave no place unvisited which could by any possibility be reached, and where she was led to believe that objects of interest could be found, to be described to readers who could not share her opportunities of travel. The enlargement of our programme of journeys within the tropics threw a heavy strain on her constitution. In Northern India her health was better than it had been for years, but she fell away after leaving Bombay. Rangoon and Borneo told upon her. She did not become really ill until the day after leaving Borneo, when she was attacked by the malarial fever which infests the river up which she had travelled to the famous bird's-nest caves. She suffered much until we reached the temperate climate of South Australia.
On leaving Brisbane we found ourselves once more in the tropics. Enfeebled by an attack of bronchitis caught at Brisbane, your mother was again seized with malarial fever. On the northern coast of Australia such fevers are prevalent, and our visits to Rockhampton, the Herbert River, Mourilyan, and Thursday Island, where we were detained ten days, were probably far from beneficial. No evil consequence was, however, anticipated; and without undue self-reproach we must bow with submission to the heavy blow which, in the ordering of Providence, has befallen us.
Your dear mother died on the morning of September 14, 1887, and her remains were committed to the deep at sunset on the same day (Lat. 15° 50´ S., Long. 110° 35´ E.) Every member of the ship's company was present to pay the last tribute of love and respect on that sad occasion. Your dear mother died in an effort to carry forward the work which, as she believed, it had pleased God to assign to her.
From your mother's books let us turn to her charities; and first her public charities. You know how she has laboured in the cause of the St. John Ambulance Association, how she has taken every opportunity of urging forward the work in every place which we visited, in the West Indies, in the Shetlands, in London, at Middlesbrough, in Sussex. At all the ports at which we touched on our last cruise she spared no pains to interest people in the work. You heard her deliver her last appeal in the cause at Rockhampton. She spoke under extreme physical difficulty, but with melting pathos. As it was her last speech, so, perhaps, it was her best.
Your mother took up ambulance work at a time when it was little in fashion, because she believed it to be a good cause. By years of hard work, in speech, in letter, by interview, by pamphlet, by personal example and devotion, she spread to multitudes the knowledge of the art of ministering first-aid to the injured. We may rest assured that her exertions have been, under Providence, the means of saving many precious lives. In her last cruise you have seen how, when painful injuries have been received, she has been the first to staunch the bleeding wound, facing trying scenes with a courage which never faltered while there was need for it, but which, as the reaction which followed too surely told, put a severe strain upon her feeble frame.