Elizabeth Gilbert and Her Work for the Blind

There are some who still remember how they pitied her when they saw Bessie sitting up in bed sipping a black draught, and they can recall the resolution with which she did it, and the conscientiousness with which she took all, to the last drop.

Some twenty years later she was walking in the garden at Eversley with Charles Kingsley, and he said to her, "When you take medicine you drink it all up. I spill some on my frock, and then I have to take it over again." It was one of those swift intuitive glances of his; he saw in the delicate woman the same patient courage that had characterised the child. She had much suffering from her throat throughout life, and as a little girl was nearly choked by a lozenge. The noteworthy point of the incident is that in the wildest tumult of alarm of those around her, the child was quite calm.

There was so little sense of her inferiority to others in early youth that it was only as the sisters grew up that they realis