he service, and
gained the love and trust of the Indian peoples. After he retired in
1876 one of his Indian friends addressed a letter to him, "John Inglis,
England, Tasmania, or wherever else he may be, this shall be delivered
to him," and through the ingenuity of the British Post Office it was
delivered in Tasmania.

Elsie's mother, Harriet Thompson, went out to India when she was
seventeen to her father, George Powney Thompson. She married when she
was eighteen.

She met her future husband, John Inglis, at a dance in her father's
house. Her children were often told by their father of the white muslin
dress, with large purple flowers all over it, worn by her that evening,
and how he and several of his friends, young men in the district, drove
fifty miles to have the chance of dancing with her!

"She must have had a steady nerve, for her letters are full of various
adventures in camp and tiger-haunted jungles, and most of them narrate
the presence of one of her infants, who was accompanying the parents on
their routine of Indian official life." In 1858, when John Inglis was
coming home on his one short furlough, she trekked down from Lahore to
Calcutta with the six children in country conveyances. The journey took
four months; then came the voyage round the Cape, another four months.
Of course she had the help of ayahs and bearers on the journeys, but
even with such help it was no easy task.

John Inglis saw his family settled in Southampton, and almost
immediately had to return to India, on the outbreak of the Mutiny. His
wife stayed at home with the children, until India was again a safe
place for English women, when she rejoined her husband in 1863.

They crowd round Elsie Inglis, these men and women in their quaint and
attractive costumes of long ago; we feel their influence on her; we see
their spirit mingling with hers. As we run our eye over the crowded
stage, we see the dim outline of the rock from which she was hewn, we
feel the spirit which was hers, and we hail it again as it drives her
forth to play her part in the great drama of the last three years of her
life.

The members of every family, every group of blood relations, are held
together by the unseen spirit of their generations. It matters little
whether they can trace their descent or not; the peculiar spirit of that
race which is theirs fashions them for particular purposes and work. And
what are they all but the varied expressions of the On