liest childhood--how can such a pen repay the great debt of gratitude
and love that I owe her whom I regarded as my chief sustainer, my most
affectionate comforter, the joy and inspiration of my life? My grief is
too immense, my remorse too profound, to be able to give full vent at this
moment to the feelings that surge within me.

Only future generations and pens abler than mine can, and will, pay a
worthy tribute to the towering grandeur of her spiritual life, to the
unique part she played throughout the tumultuous stages of Baha'i history,
to the expressions of unqualified praise that have streamed from the pen
of both Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha, the Center of His covenant, though
unrecorded, and in the main unsuspected by the mass of her passionate
admirers in East and West, the share she has had in influencing the course
of some of the chief events in the annals of the Faith, the sufferings she
bore, the sacrifices she made, the rare gifts of unfailing sympathy she so
strikingly displayed--these, and many others stand so inextricably
interwoven with the fabric of the Cause itself that no future historian of
the Faith of Baha'u'llah can afford to ignore or minimize.

As far back as the concluding stages of the heroic age of the Cause, which
witnessed the imprisonment of Baha'u'llah in the Siyah-_Ch_al of Tihran,
the Greatest Holy Leaf, then still in her infancy, was privileged to taste
of the cup of woe which the first believers of that apostolic age had
quaffed.

How well I remember her recall, at a time when her faculties were still
unimpaired, the gnawing suspense that ate into the hearts of those who
watched by her side, at the threshold of her pillaged house, expectant to
hear at any moment the news of Baha'u'llah's imminent execution! In those
sinister hours, she often recounted, her parents had so suddenly lost
their earthly possessions that within the space of a single day from being
the privileged member of one of the wealthiest families of Tihran she had
sunk to the state of a sufferer from unconcealed poverty. Deprived of the
means of subsistence, her illustrious mother, the famed Navvab, was
constrained to place in the palm of her daughter's hand a handful of flour
and to induce her to accept it as a substitute for her daily bread.

And when at a later time this revered and precious member of the Holy
Family, then in her teens, came to be entrusted by the guiding hand of her
Father with missions that