Her favorite piece on the "Victor" that summer was "The Artillerist's Oath." The music had a gallant ring to it, and there was something heroic about the whole thing, something that suggested the Forlorn Hope—how many of them she had led! When nine o'clock came, she would ask for this piece by the nickname she had given it, taken from one of its odd lines,—
"I'll wed thee in the battle's front!"
While the song was being given, she was all alert and alive, even if she may have been sleepy earlier in the evening. She would get up with a little gesture of courage, and take leave of us, always with a certain ceremony, that was like the withdrawing of royalty. The evening was then over, and we too went to bed!
As we gather up our treasures of this last summer, we remember that several things might have prepared us for what was coming, had not our eyes been holden. She spoke a great deal of old times, the figures of her childhood and girlhood being evidently very near to her. She quoted them often; "My grandma used to say—" She spoke as naturally as the boy in the next room might speak of her.
She would not look in the glass; "I don't like to see my old face!" she said. She could not see the beauty that every one else saw. Yet she kept to the very last a certain tender coquetry. She loved her white dresses, and the flowered silk cloak of that last summer. She chose with care the jewels suited to each costume, the topaz cross for the white, the amethysts for the lilac. She had a great dread of old people's being untidy or unprepossessing in appearance, and never grudged the moments spent in adjusting the right cap and lace collar.
There was an almost unearthly light in her face, a transparency and sweetness that spoke to others more plainly than to us: Hugh Birckhead saw and recognized it as a look he had seen in other faces of saintly age, as their translation approached. But we said joyously to her and to each other, "She will round out the century; we shall all keep the Hundredth Birthday together!" And we and she partly believed it.
The doctor had insisted strongly that she should keep, through the summer at least, the trained nurse who had ministered to her after her fall. She "heard what he said, but it made no difference." In early August she records "a passage at arms with Maud, in which I clearly announced my intention of dispensing with the services of a trained nurse, my good health and simple habits rendering it entirely unnecessary."
She threatened to write to her man of business.
"I would rather die," she said, "than be an old woman with a nurse!"
Maud and Florence wept, argued, implored, but the nurse was dismissed. The Journal acknowledges that "her ministrations and Dr. Cobb's diagnosis have been very beneficial to my bodily health." On the same day she records the visit of a Persian Prince, who had come to this country chiefly to see two persons, the President of the United States and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. "He also claims to be a reincarnation of some remarkable philosopher; and to be so greatly interested in the cause of Peace that he declines to visit our ships now in the harbor here, to which he has been invited."