The acorns are again ripe on your oaks, the leaves of your nut tree begin to turn gold, the fruit trees you planted a lustre since, droop with their weight of crimson fruit, the little grey squirrels leap nimbly from bough to bough busily preparing for winter’s siege. The air is fragrant with the perfume of wild grape, joyous with the voices of children passing to the white school house on the hill. The earth laughs with the joy of the harvest. What thank offering can I bring for this year that has not yet taught me how to live without you? Only this sheaf of gleanings from your fields!

OAK GLEN, September, 1911.

FOREWORD

This slight and hasty account of some of my mother’s later activities was written to read to a small group of friends with whom I wished to share the lesson of the Eleventh Hour of a life filled to the end with the joy of toil. More than one of my hearers asked me to print what I had read them, in the belief that it would be of value to that larger circle of her friends, the public. Such a request could not be refused.

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

IN THE LIFE OF

JULIA WARD HOWE

My mother’s diary for 1906, her eighty-seventh year, opens with this entry:

“I pray for many things this year. For myself, I ask continued health of mind and body, work, useful, honorable and as remunerative as it shall please God to send. For my dear family, work of the same description with comfortable wages, faith in God, and love to each other. For my country, that she may keep her high promise to mankind, for Christendom, that it may become more Christlike, for the struggling nationalities, that they may attain to justice and peace.”

Not vain the prayer! Health of mind and body was granted, work, useful, honorable, if not very remunerative, was hers that year and nearly five years more, for she lived to be ninety-one and a half years old. When Death came and took her, he found her still at work. Hers the fate of the happy warrior who falls in thick of battle, his harness on his back.

How did she do it?

Hardly a day passes that I am not asked the question!

Shortly before her death, she spoke of the time when she would no longer be with us--an almost unheard-of thing for her to do. We turned the subject, begged her not to dwell on it.

“Yes!” she laughed with the old flash that has kindled a thousand audiences, “it’s not my business to think about dying, it’s my business to think about living!”

This thinking about living, this tremendous vitality had much to do with her long service, for the important thing of course was not that she lived ninety-one years, but that she worked for more than ninety-one years, never became a cumberer of the earth, paid her scot till the last. She never knew the pathos of doing old-age work, such as is provided in every class for those inveterate workers to whom labor is as necessary as bread or breath. The old ploughman sits by the wayside breaking stones to mend the road others shall travel over; the old prima donna listens to her pupils’ triumphs; the old statesman gives after-dinner speeches, or makes himself a nuisance by speaking or writing, ex cathedra, on any question that needs airing, whether it is his subject or not; she did good, vigorous work till the end, in her own chosen callings of poet and orator. What she produced in her last year was as good in quality as any other year’s output. The artist in her never stopped growing; indeed, her latest work has a lucidity, a robust simplicity, that some of

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