ased because the people wished to read the book
Uncle Tom loved so much.

_Uncle Tom's Cabin_, like _Les Miserables_, and a few other novels,
will live, because written with a purpose. No work of fiction is
permanent without some great underlying principle or object.

Soon after the Civil War, Mrs. Stowe bought a home among the orange
groves of Florida, and thither she goes each winter, with her family.
She has done much there for the colored people whom she helped to make
free. With the proceeds of some public readings at the North she
built a church, in which her husband preached as long as his health
permitted. Her home at Mandarin, with its great moss-covered oaks and
profusion of flowers, is a restful and happy place after these most
fruitful years.

Her summer residence in Hartford, Conn., beautiful without, and
artistic within, has been visited by thousands, who honor the noble
woman not less than the gifted author.

Many of the Beecher family have died; Lyman Beecher at eighty-three,
and Catharine at seventy-eight. Some of Mrs. Stowe's own children are
waiting for her in the other country. She says, "I am more interested
in the other side of Jordan than this, though this still has its
pleasures."

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,
Henr