On Mrs. Stowe’s seventy-first birthday, her publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., gave a garden party in her honor, at the hospitable home of Governor Claflin and his wife, at Newton, Mass.  Poets and artists, statesmen and reformers, were invited to meet the famous author.  On a stage, under a great tent, she sat, while poems were read and speeches made.  The brown curls had become snowy white, and the bright eyes of girlhood had grown deeper and more earnest.  The manner was the same as ever, unostentatious, courteous, kindly.

Her life is but another confirmation of the well-known fact, that the best work of the world is done, not by the loiterers, but by those whose hearts and hands are full of duties.  Mrs. Stowe died about noon, July 1, 1896, of paralysis, at Hartford, Conn., at the age of eighty-five.  She passed away as if to sleep, her son, the Rev. Charles Edward Stowe, and her daughters, Eliza and Harriet, standing by her bedside.  Since the death of her husband, Professor Calvin E. Stowe, in 1886, Mrs. Stowe had gradually failed physically and mentally.  She was buried July 3 in the cemetery connected with the Theological Seminary at Andover, Mass., between the graves of her husband and her son, Henry.  The latter was drowned in the Connecticut River, while a member of Dartmouth College, July 19, 1857.

HELEN HUNT JACKSON.

[Illustration:  HELEN HUNT JACKSON.]

Thousands were saddened when, Aug. 12, 1885, it was flashed across the wires that Helen Hunt Jackson was dead.  The Nation said, “The news will probably carry a pang of regret into more American homes than similar intelligence in regard to any other woman, with the possible exception of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

How, with the simple initials, “H.H.,” had she won this place in the hearts of the people?  Was it because she was a poet?  Oh no! many persons of genius have few friends.  It was because an earnest life was back of her gifted writings.  A great book needs a great man or woman behind it to make it a perfect work.  Mrs. Jackson’s literary work will be abiding, but her life, with its dark shadow and bright sunlight, its deep affections and sympathy with the oppressed, will furnish a rich setting for the gems of thought which she gave to the world.

Born in the cultured town of Amherst, Mass., Oct. 18, 1831, she inherited from her mother a sunny, buoyant nature, and from her father, Nathan W. Fiske, professor of languages and philosophy in the college, a strong and vigorous mind.  Her own vivid description of the “naughtiest day in my life,” in St. Nicholas, September and October, 1880, shows the ardent, wilful child who was one day to stand out fearlessly before the nation and tell its statesmen the wrong they had done to “her Indians.”