, and I was only one of many who lent a hand or made suggestions.
He was working very hard, and once wrote that he was going for a week to his boyhood home to rest.
During all this period there was, no doubt, the painful business entanglement in the background, but there was also in the foreground the literary work whose assuaging influence only one who has participated in it can understand.
Then came another blow in the death of his mother, announced to me as follows:--
44 East 26th St., New York, Dec. 8th, 1889.
My dear
Higginson,--Yes: I have been through a kind of Holy Week, and have come out in so incorporeal a state that I strive painfully, though most gratefully, to render thanks to some, at least, of my beautiful mother's friends and mine who have taken note of her departure.
I have always wished that she and you could know more of each otherthough nothing of yours escaped her eager taste and judgment, for she was not only a natural critic, but a very
clanswoman, with a most loyal faith in her blood and yours.
Most of all, she was a typical woman, an intensely human one, to the last, though made of no common clay.
She was of an age to die, and I am glad that her fine intelligence was spared a season of dimness.
Still,
I have suffered a loss, and doubtless one that will last a lifetime.
