It was not easy for Dr. Sewall to let her go thus finally, and her first letters are not a little pathetic, but—born friend of heroes as she was— she helped to fasten the armour on. “If you don’t come back to America,” she said, “you won’t give up the work. You will open the profession to women in England.” And so it came about that Sophia Jex-Blake sought a medical education in her native land. _PART II_ It is as hard a thing to maintain a sound understanding, a tender conscience, a lively, gracious, heavenly frame of spirit, and an upright life, amid contention, as it is to keep your candle lighted in the greatest storms. RICHARD BAXTER. Individuals, feeling strongly, while on the one hand they are incidentally faulty in mode or language, are still peculiarly _effective_. No great work was done by a system; whereas systems rise out of individual exertions. Luther was an individual. The very faults of an individual excite attention; he loses, but his cause (if good, and he powerful-minded) gains. This is the way of things; we promote truth by a self-sacrifice. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. CHAPTER I DRIFTING S.J.-B. landed at Queenstown on November 27th, 1868, and “came rushing through Cork, Dublin and Holyhead on that weary 24 hours’ journey” back to the home in Brighton, to find that she had arrived too late. Her Father had died some three weeks before, and outwardly the household had already settled down to the old life—as households do—in a way that to her ardent nature must at first have seemed passing strange. There was the joy and pain of meeting her Mother again,—the joy and pain of finding that that Mother was too fine a Christian to be broken-hearted at the prospect of so brief a parting,—and then, little by little, there came for S.J.-B. the realization of all she had left behind. On board the _Java_ she had written to Dr. Sewall: “The first thing of all I want to do is to write and tell you what I said so very imperfectly in my hurry and worry when you left,—how much your kind thought for me in arranging even the little things of my cabin has touched me.... Even now when I am going home—and going under such circumstances—the thought of all you have done for me and of all I owe you, comes uppermost.... Mrs. Browning says,— ‘God gives what he gives—be content, He resumes nothing given, be sure,’ and your love and help have been given to me, and I _know_ it is not all over now.... I am going home now to try and be a child once more,—simply to love and serve my Mother, as God will help me (for I do believe in Him in my pain and my love in my heart of hearts) and I believe that by being a child I shall learn to grow a better woman.”