Who now to rest departs?
Nay, for the children of her love,
To their full stature grown,
Must learn amid their tears to prove
How they can go alone.”
Emily Hickey.
Fifty years of work! Of work that, had she been other than she was, might have been mere thankless drudgery; of work that, being what she was, remains a living influence, spreading, in ever-widening circles, to distances beyond compute. Fifty years of love, poured out from a heart often disappointed, but never embittered; often left unfilled, but never found empty; often strained to utmost tension, but never relaxing its high energy. Being as she was, refreshed by the living water, sustained by the bread of life, the strength was hers that knows neither drought nor famine.
For more than forty years she had worshipped in the same church—Holy Trinity—built by her friend the Rev. David Laing, and afterwards held by her friends, the Rev. E. Spooner, the Rev. Charles Lee, and Dr. Cutts.
To this altar she came, through all her working time, to renew the strength in which her work was done as “Christ’s faithful soldier and servant to her life’s end.” And here, when that end came, the last gleams of the dying year fell on the white blossoms that hid all that was mortal of that brave spirit, while the vast crowd knelt to give thanks for a life which had made all life so much the more worth living to themselves and to all women who should come after them.
“The good die never!” There can be no end to this high influence that for the half-century past has gone out, carrying with it all that is true, all that is pure, all that is lovely. It must still go on in the centuries to come in added power, since