ed in the
meantime "the life of a cabbage." Dr. Little was never sanguine. Dr.
Hughlings Jackson and Dr. Hawkesley held out but little hope of
improvement. All agreed that she must rest, vegetate, lead the life of
an invalid.

When the prospect of the future really dawned upon her, who can wonder
that she found submission, acquiescence, exceedingly hard. "My whole
being revolts at the very idea," she said one day.

On another occasion, with a part humorous, part pathetic expression, she
exclaimed, "The change is great and," after a pause, "not pleasant." But
in later years, after long and patient suffering, she was able to say,
"Many have a heavier cross."

She announced by letter to the present writer the verdict of her
physicians, adding the pathetic words, "Love me to the end."

CHAPTER XX

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

"By two wings a man is raised above the earth, namely by Simplicity
and Purity."--THOMAS A KEMPIS.

There was still much within Bessie's power; and in tracing her work at
this period we find little diminution in her correspondence. She
received letters almost daily from Colonel Fyers on the business of the
Institution. Levy wrote frequently and fully to her. She had given him
great assistance in writing a book on _Blindness and the Blind_, and her
own notes were made over to him.

A letter which she received in March 1872 is interesting as a
description of preparations made by a blind man, Levy, carried out by a
blind carpenter, Farrow, and related to the blind lady, Miss Gilbert.
The occasion was the Thanksgiving for the Restoration of the Prince of
Wales in February 1872, when the streets were gay with decorations and
every window full of spectators. No house showed more bravely than the
Institution for Promoting the Welfare of the Blind in Oxford Street;
subscribers and their friends, the Committee and their friends, filled
every window, and the blind were keenly alive to all that was going on
around them, and to the distinction of the Prince's plume and gas jets
and the letters V.R., "each about four feet long in gold paper."

"The decorations," writes Levy, "consisted of a Union Jack flag at
the top of the house, and about half way up a crown and Prince's
plume, made of gold paper, projecting from the wall, and the
letters V.R., each about four feet long and two feet broad, made in
thick rossets in silver paper on crimson ground, also projecting