ne who has your truest interest at heart, who is, like
yourselves, without sight, and who tries, to the best of her power,
to understand what it is to be poor as well as blind, and who longs
for your help and co-operation in the work of endeavouring to help
you to help yourselves. You will help me, will you not?--Believe
me, my dear friends, to be most sincerely yours,
ELIZABETH GILBERT.

_P.S._--I have signed my name with the pen which Mr. Levy invented
for us. You and I must pray that God will help me to do what will
be best for you. I know God will not leave us, for He loveth the
blind, as He doth all human beings, more than we can possibly
understand or know, so that we must try and trust in Him fully in
all our trials. May God bless you all!

With advancing spring the cloud of depression was dispelled. She became
more cheerful, began to talk of a return to London, and to look forward
to her life there. The return journey was undertaken in the second week
in June. It was safely accomplished, though at the cost of very great
weariness and exhaustion. When she reached Stanhope Place and had been
carried to her room, she said, "No more journeys for me." This was
indeed her last journey, for though in 1877 she had such a longing for
fresh country air that there was a consultation, and her physicians
sanctioned removal, yet when the time came her heart failed, and she
remained at home.

On her return from Torquay she went into Hyde Park about half a dozen
times in an invalid chair, but after October 1874 she left the house no
more. She was, however, still able for a time to be dressed, to sit up
for an hour or two, and to be carried up and down stairs. As the winter
advanced a sitting-room was arranged on the same floor as her bedroom,
and then she came downstairs daily no more. In spite of all precautions
against cold she had a severe attack of bronchitis in 1875, and was
attended by Dr. Hawkesley, whom she knew and liked as a fellow-worker on
the Council of the Normal College for the Blind. He was struck by the
manner in which she threw off the attack. "She is doing so gallantly,"
he said. But she did not regain the strength lost during this illness,
and resumed life after every access of sorrow and suffering on a lower
level, as it were, and with diminished vital powers. After the spring of
1875 she was not