I fear no doctor would stay with
me there. I may go away North-east. I can hardly tell yet.
Meantime, with God's help, I hope to do another month's work in
Peking, and then hand the thing over to Rees once for all. Most of
my books I'll sell. What use are they to me? I never have time to
read them, and am not likely ever to have.'

The letter just quoted was written after the sad event to which we must
now refer. Towards the close of the summer of 1885 Mr. Gilmour awoke to
the fact that one of the heaviest sorrows of his life was coming upon
him. For some years past Mrs. Gilmour had been subject to severe attacks
of pain. The visit to England and the rest and change of the old home
life had in a measure restored her. But hardly were they comfortably
established in their old Peking quarters ere some of her most trying
symptoms reappeared. With that brave heart and resolute spirit
characteristic of her whole missionary career, for a time she gave
herself to the duties of the mission and bore her full share of its
anxieties and toils. But gradually she was constrained to recognise that
her active work was over. From the first she had thrown herself
whole-heartedly into missionary Service. She could converse fluently
with the Mongols, having acquired their language in the same way as her
husband, by enduring repeatedly all the privations of life in a Mongol
tent. She had impressed them by her fondness for animals, by her
gentleness of spirit, and by her evident interest in all that bore upon
their own welfare. In Peking she had laboured hard among the women and
girls, both in the matter of education and also of direct religious
instruction. A very bitter element in her cup of sorrow was the
conviction gradually forced upon her that her power to do this work was
fast slipping away. In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Meech, then in
England, dated May 2, 1885, she gives the first clear expression to this
feeling: 'I would have written before, but I have been ill for about six
weeks; not actually ill, except one week, but not able to do anything
except the children's lessons and the harmonium on Sundays sometimes.
All the rest has had to go. I am sorry, but it can't be helped. How long
it will last I don't know. I can't get stronger, so I must be content to
be tired. I am nothing more than weak, and a great many people are that.
There has been a grand revival here. It seemed to pass like a mountain
torren