to the mountain of correspondence and,
expecting to spend most of the next year at home, gave every spare
moment to the arranging and classifying of her mass of documents,
preparatory to some contemplated literary work. On November 21, the
Political Equality Club celebrated Mrs. Stanton's birthday in a
beautiful manner at the Anthony home, over 200 guests attending. Several
unkind newspaper attacks being made upon Miss Anthony by disgruntled
women, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who was much distressed: "This fresh
onslaught reminds me of the old adage, 'When one is over-praised by the
many, the few will try to pull down and destroy.' Certainly I know that
in my head and heart there never has been any but the strongest desire
that all the other workers should have their full meed of opportunity
and reward."

A telegram came November 25 announcing the sudden death, in Boston, of
Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick. She had been actively in the suffrage work
for only a few years, but in that time Miss Anthony had learned her
splendid powers and had said of her: "I feel that into her hands can
safely fall the work of the future, both as to principle and policy."
She had been made chairman of the national press work, and had shown an
unsurpassed beauty and strength of style and thought. "She was a
philosopher, a student," Miss Anthony wrote, "possessed of the
conscience and the courage to stand by the truth as she saw it. Can it
be that she is gone in the very prime of her womanhood? Why can not we
keep with us the brave and beautiful souls; why can not the weak and
wicked go? The world seems darker to me now, a light has gone out."

On December 2 she gathered about her a group of the very oldest and
dearest friends in memory of what would have been her mother's one
hundred and second birthday. She records attending a lecture by
President Andrew D. White, at the close of which he presented his wife
to her, saying: "I want you to know her; she is of your kind." The day
before Christmas came another telegram, this one from May Wright Sewall,
containing simply the words: "Dear General, my Theodore is taken." It
meant the desolation of one of the happiest, most perfect homes ever
made by two mortals. It told the breaking of as strong and sweet a tie
as ever united husband and wife. What could she write? Only, "Be brave
in this inevitable hour; take unto yourself the 'joy of sorrow' that you
did all in mortal power for his restoration, that