From Winchester—twenty miles away.”
May I be permitted, in conclusion, to mention that none of the hundreds of battle-chargers ridden by Washington, Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Sheridan, suffered mutilation by the barbarous modern practice of docking their tails, which even uncivilized savages never perpetrate on their horses.
MRS. LONGBOW’S BIOGRAPHY
BY GORDON HALL GEROULD
MY acquaintance with Mrs. Longbow was due to my early friendship with her son Charles. Mrs. Longbow and her two daughters swung into my orbit quite unimportantly at first as shadowy persons to whom Charlie wrote letters home while we were boys at school; later I came to know the mother as an imposing figure, shiny with black jet, who eyed the school from a platform on those great occasions when Charlie received prizes and I did not. I never learned her weight, but I saw that her displacement was enormous. By successive stages, as I increased in stature and in years, my knowledge of her grew. I visited her son, I danced with her daughters, I frequently conversed with her,—she preferred to converse rather than to talk,—and I came to know as much of her habit and attitude of mind, perhaps, as one could who was thirty years her junior, not actively engaged in reforming the world, and of the despised sex.
Mrs. Longbow—Amelia E. Longbow, to designate her at once by the name that she made illustrious—was of the older school of philanthropists, who combined militant activity with the literary graces and a tremendous sense of personal dignity. She could despise men and yet receive them in her drawing-room without embarrassment; she could wage a bitter warfare on wickedness and, when deeply stirred, write a tolerable sonnet. She was indefatigable in her labors, but she was never, to my knowledge, flurried or hurried. A large presence, she moved through life with the splendid serenity of a steam-roller. She was capable of prodigious labor, but not of idleness. Whatever her hands found to do she did with all her might—and in her own way. At one time or another she was engaged in reforming most things that are susceptible of improvement or of disturbance. If she did not leave the world better than she found it, the fault was the world’s, not hers.
It was a considerable shock to me that she should leave the world at all, so necessary had she seemingly become to its proper administration, let alone its progress. I read the news of her death in London just as I was sailing for home after a summer’s holiday, and I felt a touch of pride that I had known the woman whose career was written large that day in the journals of a sister nation. But, as I reflected, neither America nor England had waited till her death to pay their homage. She had lived long, and on many great occasions during three decades she had been signally and publicly honored as the most remarkable of her sex. The cable-despatches announced that she left a comfortable fortune, and leading articles agreed that she was wholly admirable. I felt sure that she would have regarded the praise as unmerited if she had not shown her ability by leaving a respectable inheritance to her children. I had reason also to believe that she never lost her self-confident assurance of her own worth: she died, the newspapers said, quite peacefully.