She was at work upon the first of these, a definition of true Religion, when the end came. Her last Tuesday on earth, she presided at the Papeterie, a social club of Newport ladies, in whose meetings she delighted. She was in splendid vein; that gay company of clever women gathered around her as pretty butterflies hover about a queen rose, still fascinated, still entranced by this belle of ninety years. She wore over her pretty white dress the hood she had received from Brown University, the year before, when she was given the degree of Doctor of Literature. She was as usual the central figure at the meeting, and gave the Club a vivid account of her visit to Smith College, whither she had gone the week before to receive another degree. The next morning she worked at her “Definition of True Religion;” five days later, the summons came. Leaving the task unfinished, as she would have said, “the iron to cool upon the anvil,” she passed on to the larger task that now absorbs her ardent spirit. During her last years she received many letters, even printed documents, with minute inquiries touching her method of life. A society of Nonogenarians sent a set of questions about her habits of body, and mind, with a postscript asking especially to what she attributed her unusually prolonged activity. Though I am sure she must have answered, for she was faithful beyond belief in such matters, we have found no record of her answer. Now she has left us, her children are often asked the same sort of question about her: “How did she do it?” “What was her secret?” “Why did she die ninety-one years young, instead of ninety-one years old?” If she herself had tried to tell you her secret, to account for her rare powers preserved so late in life, spent so prodigally at an age when the lean and slippered pantaloon hoards his scant store of strength as a miser hoards his gold, she would have said something like this: “You must remember I had a splendid Irish wet-nurse!” Perhaps she laid too much stress on that excellent woman’s share in making her all she was (no foster-mother was ever more faithfully remembered by nursling); she owed something, surely, to her forebears. She came of good old fighting stock; in her veins thrilled the blood of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Virginia, of General Greene, both heroes of the Revolution, of that staunch old rebel, Roger Williams, of the Wards, for two generations colonial Governors of Rhode Island. All this fighting blood, together with her red hair, gave a certain militant touch to her character; she was a good fighter for every just cause, especially the cause of Peace. Though she spoke oftener of the Irish wet-nurse than of her ancestors, she did not altogether forget them as an anecdote told by my sister, Mrs. Richards, proves. They were at some meeting, a religious gathering I think, where one speaker--rather an effete pessimist--closed a speech in the key of the “Everlasting No,” with the doleful words: