us patiently gather the twigs and the little scraps of moss,
of dried grass together, and see the result!--a whole, completed and
coherent, beautiful even without the song.

We come too soon to the story of her death. And yet did it come too
soon? A sweet life is not the sweeter for being long. Jane Austen lived
years enough to fulfil her mission. She lived long enough to write six
books that were masterpieces in their way--to make a world the happier
for her industry.

One cannot read the story of her latter days, of her patience, her
sweetness, and gratitude, without emotion. There is family trouble, we
are not told of what nature. She falls ill. Her nieces find her in her
dressing-gown, like an invalid, in an arm-chair in her bedroom; but she
gets up and greets them, and, pointing to seats which had been arranged
for them by the fire, says: 'There is a chair for the married lady, and
a little stool for you, Caroline.' But she is too weak to talk, and
Cassandra takes them away.

At last they persuade her to go to Winchester, to a well-known doctor
there.

'It distressed me,' she says, in one of her last, dying letters, 'to see
Uncle Henry and William Knight, who kindly attended us, riding in the
rain almost the whole way. We expect a visit from them to-morrow, and
hope they will stay the night; and on Thursday, which is a confirmation
and a holiday, we hope to get Charles out to breakfast. We have had but
one visit from _him_, poor fellow, as he is in the sick room.... God
bless you, dear E.; if ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed
as I have been....'

But nursing does not cure her, nor can the doctor save her to them all,
and she sinks from day to day. To the end she is full of concern for
others.

'As for my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse has
not been made ill by her exertions,' she writes. 'As to what I owe her,
and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I
can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more.'

One can hardly read this last sentence with dry eyes. It is her parting
blessing and farewell to those she had blessed all her life by her
presence and her love--that love which is beyond death; and of which the
benediction remains, not only spoken in words, but by the ever-present
signs and the tokens of those lifetimes which do not end for us as long
as we ourselves exist.

They asked her when she was near her end if there w