rilliant centre of all
festivities. I understood well that this was the first reaction of her
proud and sensitive nature under an irremediable pain. She never returned
to ----, but established herself in a Southern city, where she lived in
great retirement for a year, doing good to all poor and suffering people,
and spending the larger part of her fortune in charity. Early in the
second year there was an epidemic of yellow fever: Mrs. Long refused to
leave the city, and went as fearlessly as the physicians to visit and
nurse the worst cases. But after the epidemic had passed by, she herself
was taken ill, and died suddenly in a hospital ward, surrounded by the
very patients whom she had nursed back to health. Nothing I could say in
my own words would give so vivid an idea of the meeting between John Gray
and his wife, as the first letter which I received from little Alice:--

"DARLING AUNTIE,--

"It is too bad you did not come too. The voyage was horrid. Papa was so
much sicker than I, that I had to take care of him all the time; but my
head ached so that I kept seeing black spots if I stooped over to kiss
papa; but papa said, I was just like another mamma.

"Oh, Auntie, only think, there was a mistake about the letters, and mamma
never got the letter to tell her that we were coming; and she was out on
the balcony of the hotel when we got out of the carriage, and first she
saw me; and the lady who was with her said she turned first red and then
so white the lady thought she was sick; and then the next minute she saw
papa, and she just fell right down among all the people, and looked as if
she was dead; and the very first thing poor papa and I saw, when we got
up-stairs, was mamma being carried by two men, and papa and I both thought
she was dead; and papa fell right down on his knees, and made the men put
mamma down on the floor, and everybody talked out loud, and papa never
spoke a word, but just looked at mamma, and nobody knew who papa was till
I spoke, and I said,--

"'That's my mamma, and papa and I have just come all the way from
America,"--and then a gentleman told me to kiss mamma, and I did; and then
she opened her eyes; and just as soon as she saw papa, she got a great
deal whiter and her head fell back again, and I was so sure she was dying,
that I began to cry out loud, and I do think there were more than a
hundred people all round us; but Louise says there were only ten or
twelve; and then the same gentl