In the summer of 1888 she paid her last visit to England, taking also a tour in Switzerland, which she greatly enjoyed.  Early in the autumn she returned to Cairo, where she was joined by her elder sister, who frequently spent the winter with her.  In February she made preparations for her usual Nile trip.  After the boat had been engaged and paid for, she caught a cold, and was urged to defer the journey; but as this would have caused extra expense, she declined.  The excitement of the work, which, on account of the doctor being unable through ill health to accompany her, was unusually heavy, kept her up for the time, but on her return to Cairo she had to retire to bed.  Bronchitis set in, and in a few days the gravest was feared.  A relapse discovered weakness of the heart, and on the morning of Saturday, March 9, 1889, her spirit fled.  Then was there, as of old, “a grievous mourning” among “the Egyptians.”  No need was there to employ professional mourners to make a wailing; the teachers and scholars, and the hundreds of poor men and women who had learned to love her, wept aloud for her.  Her body was laid to rest in the English cemetery in Cairo, but she herself rested from her labours among those of whom she wrote:—­

     “Oh! they’ve reached the sunny shore
          Over there;
      They will never hunger more;
      All their pain and grief is o’er;
          Over there.

      Oh! they’ve done the weary fight
          Over there;
      Jesus saved them by His might;
      And they walk with Him in white;
          Over there.”

      W.R.  Bowman

AGNES JONES[1]

[Footnote 1:  The extracts are made, by kind permission of Messrs. Nisbet & Co., from Agnes Jones, by her sister.]

CHAPTER I.

YOUTHFUL DAYS.

A chance visitor to the Liverpool Workhouse on Brownlow Hill might be lost in wonder at its vastness, as he looked at its streets of large buildings and was told of its more than four thousand inhabitants.  He would scarcely imagine that those bare-looking groups of buildings possess an historic interest.  Yet to the Christian philanthropist it is holy ground, for there, in willing sacrifice for others, were spent the last years of the life of that saintly woman who gave the death-blow to the old system of pauper nursing and all its attendant evils.  But we are looking at the stream as it enters the limitless ocean of eternity.  We can do that again by-and-by.  Let us turn now rather to the beginning of that stream of life and trace it onwards.

Agnes Elizabeth Jones was born at Cambridge on the 10th of November, 1832, the 12th Regiment, of which her father was the lieutenant-colonel, having arrived there only a few days before.

When Agnes was about five years of age, her father’s regiment, which had previously been quartered at Cork, was ordered to Mauritius.  The wonderfully varied and beautiful scenery of this little island—­a tiny gem set in the heart of the Indian Ocean—­with its curiously shaped mountains, and tropical trees and plants, made a wonderful impression on the mind of the child, and although she was only eleven years old when she left, she always cherished the memory of it.