The acorns are again ripe on your oaks, the leaves of your nut tree begin to turn gold, the fruit trees you planted a lustre since, droop with their weight of crimson fruit, the little grey squirrels leap nimbly from bough to bough busily preparing for winter’s siege. The air is fragrant with the perfume of wild grape, joyous with the voices of children passing to the white school house on the hill. The earth laughs with the joy of the harvest. What thank offering can I bring for this year that has not yet taught me how to live without you? Only this sheaf of gleanings from your fields!
Oak Glen, September, 1911.
FOREWORD
This slight and hasty account of some of my mother’s later activities was written to read to a small group of friends with whom I wished to share the lesson of the Eleventh Hour of a life filled to the end with the joy of toil. More than one of my hearers asked me to print what I had read them, in the belief that it would be of value to that larger circle of her friends, the public. Such a request could not be refused.
THE ELEVENTH HOUR
IN THE LIFE OF
JULIA WARD HOWE
My mother’s diary for 1906, her eighty-seventh year, opens with this entry:
“I pray for many things this year. For myself, I ask continued health of mind and body, work, useful, honorable and as remunerative as it shall please God to send. For my dear family, work of the same description with comfortable wages, faith in God, and love to each other. For my country, that she may keep her high promise to mankind, for Christendom, that it may become more Christlike, for the struggling nationalities, that they may attain to justice and peace.”
Not vain the prayer! Health of mind and body was granted, work, useful, honorable, if not very remunerative, was hers that year and nearly five years more, for she lived to be ninety-one and a half years old. When Death came and took her, he found her still at work. Hers the fate of the happy warrior who falls in thick of battle, his harness on his back.