JOSEPH B. GILDER. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE HARRIET BEECHER STOWE IN HARTFORD Until Mrs. Stowe’s health began to fail, twice a day regularly she walked abroad for an hour or more, and between times she was apt to be more or less out of doors. The weather had to be unmistakably prohibitory to keep her housed from morning till night. Not infrequently her forenoon stroll took her to the house of her son, the Rev. Charles E. Stowe, two miles away, in the north part of the city. So long as the season admitted of it, she inclined to get off the pavement into the fields; and she was not afraid to climb over or under a fence. As one would infer from her writings, she was extremely fond of wild flowers, and from early spring to late autumn invariably came in with her hands full of them. To a friend who met her once on one of her outings, she exhibited a spray of leaves, and passed on with the single disconsolate remark, “Not one flower can I find,” as if she had failed of her object. As a general thing she preferred to be unaccompanied on her walks. She moved along at a good pace, but, so to speak, quietly, with her head bent somewhat forward, and at times so wrapped in thought as to pass without recognition people whom she knew, even when saluted by them. Yet she would often pause to talk with children whom she saw at their sports, and amuse both herself and them with kindly inquiries about their affairs--the game they were playing or what not. One day she stopped a little girl of the writer’s acquaintance, who was performing the then rather unfeminine feat of riding a bicycle, and had her show how she managed the mount and the dismount, etc., while she looked on laughing and applauding. It was very much her way, in making her pedestrian rounds, to linger and watch workingmen employed in their various crafts, and to enter into conversation with them--always in a manner to give them pleasure. She said once: “I keep track of all the new houses going up in town, and I have talked with the men who are building most of them.” A number of years ago her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, sent her a letter which he had received from a friend in Germany, condoling with him on the supposed event of her decease, a rumor of which had somehow got started in Europe; and this letter afforded her no little entertainment, especially its closing with the expression “Peace to her ashes.” “I guess,” she observed with a humorous smile, and using her native dialect, “the gentleman would think my ashes pretty lively, if he was here.” To what multitudes was her continued presence in the world she blessed a grateful circumstance!