result, because it has not been consecutive and methodical. One
would like one's own failures to be one's friends' stepping-stones. I
_may_ say too that I have an excuse which, thank GOD, you can't plead
now--ill-health. It is not always easy, even for oneself, to judge when
languor at the precise instant of recurring duty is spine-ache from
brain work, and the sofa is the remedy,--or when it is what (in
reference to an unpublished--indeed unwritten--story on this head) I
call Boneless on the spine! MY back is apt to ache in any case!... I am
trying to teach myself that if one _has_ been working, one has not
necessarily been working to good purpose, and that one may waste
strength and forces of all sorts, as well as time!

Curious that _you_ and D---- should both have quoted that saying of J.H.
Newman to me in one week! I also will adopt it! Indeed "bit by bit" is
the only way _I_ feel equal to improve in _anything_, and I do think it
is GOD's way of teaching and leading us all as a rule, and it is the
principle on the face of all His creation--_Gradual_ growth. The art of
being happy was never difficult to me. I think I am permitted an unusual
_intensity_ of joy in common cheap pleasures and natural beauties--fresh
air, colour, etc., etc., to compensate for some ill-health and
deprivations.

Herewith comes my "Portrait by Spoker," and a copy of a Chinnery. The
first-fruits of "regular" work at drawing an hour a day!!!

Farewell, Beloved.... Ever your very loving old sister,
JULIANA HORATIA EWING.

TO A.E.

_Ecclesfield Vicarage, Sheffield_.
Sunday, Oct. 5, 1873.

... It is all over. She _is_ with your Father and Mother, and the dear
Bishop, and my two brothers, and many an old friend who has "gone
before." Had she been merely a friend she is one of those whose loss
cannot but be felt more as years and experience make one realize the
value of certain noble qualities, and their rarity; but if
GOD has laid a heavy cross upon us in this blow,--which seems
such a blow in spite of long preparing!--He has given us every
comfort, every concession to the weaknesses of our love in the
accidents of her death.... It was an ideal end. GOD Who had
permitted her to suffer so sorely in body, and to be often visited in
old times--by dread of death and of "death-agonies," parted the waves
of the last Jordan, and she "went through dryshod!"... The sense of
her higher state is so overwhelming, one _cannot_ indulge a _common_