confesses to her diary, "I have suffered for necessary food. I have
not one cent in the world. I have stood the brunt alone of a
persecution that I believe no other person in the country has
endured.... I honestly think that the Government should see that I was
sustained."

At last she was given a clerkship in the Post-Office Department at
Washington, but after two years this was taken from her, probably for
political reasons, and it was recommended that she be given a
clerkship of a lower grade. This was done, and although she was cut by
the injustice of the act, she clung patiently to her only means of
support. Two weeks later, it is said that a Northern newspaper
contained an editorial which spoke sneeringly of "A Troublesome
Relic," and ended with, "We draw the line at Miss Van Lew." Even
though she had not a penny in the world, she could not bear the sting
of that, and she wrote her resignation, and went back to the great,
lonely house on Church Hill a heart-broken, pitiable woman, who had
given her all for what she believed to be the cause of right and
justice.

But she could not live in the old mansion alone, and without food or
money. In despair she wrote a letter to a friend in the North, a
relative of Col. Paul Revere, whom she had helped when he was a
prisoner in the Libby. She had to borrow a stamp from an old negro to
send the letter, and even worse to her than that was the necessity of
revealing her desperate plight. But she need not have felt as she did.
As soon as the letter reached its destination there was a hurried
indignation meeting of those Boston men who knew what she had done for
the Union, and immediately and gladly they provided an ample annuity
for her, which placed her beyond all need for the remaining years of
her life. This was, of course, a great relief; but even so, it could
not ease the burden of her lonely isolation.

"No one will walk with us on the street," she writes; "no one will go
with us anywhere.... It grows worse and worse as the years roll
on...."

And so the weary months and years went by, and at last, in the old
mansion with its haunting memories, nursed by an aged negress to whom
she had given freedom years before, Elizabeth Van Lew died. Among her
effects there was found on a torn bit of paper this paragraph:

"If I am entitled to the name of 'Spy' because I was in the Secret
Service, I accept it willingly, but it will hereafter have to my mind
a high and honorabl