Again and again, too, Mrs. Booth would receive deputations of Officers of different classes and from various countries in which The Army was at work, who came to Clacton-on-Sea, where the last fifteen months of her life were spent, to listen to her words of advice and inspiration.
There were no Corps Cadets in those days; but our Army Mother left some specially beautiful words about the Juniors, to which I must refer.
When she was told by the Officer then in charge of our Junior Work in England that the children loved and prayed continually for her, she smiled.
‘The thought of the little ones,’ says some one who was there, ’brought our beloved Army Mother wholly out of herself and her pain and weariness.’
‘A very choice branch of the work,’ she said. ’I have often told Emma that I hoped when I was too old for public work God would let me end where I began–with the children. But it seems that it is not to be so.’
‘Give the children,’ she went on, in reply to the messages they had sent, ’my dear love, and tell them that if there had been a Salvation Army when I was ten I should have been a Soldier then, as I am to-day.
Never allow yourself to be discouraged in your work. I know you must meet with many discouragements; but I am sure the Spirit of God works mightily on little children long before grown people think they are able to understand.’
Again and again during that last year of awful suffering it seemed as if Mrs. Booth were about to leave us; but then she would revive, and come back to endure more weeks and months of agony.
But at last, on October 4, 1890, all could see that she was on the brink of the River, and even those who loved her the most tenderly could not wish to hold her back.
‘O Emma, let me go, darling,’ she whispered; and hearing the reply, ’Yes, we will, we will,’ she said, ‘Now! Yes, Lord, come, Oh, come!’