The latter part of her life must have contrasted painfully with the days of her childhood, yet she kept through all her trials her sweet serenity of mind, her habit of making the best of everything. She is described as a short, stout woman, with a face shining with quiet happiness and unselfishness. The appreciation with which her sketches were received gave her much pleasure, and the fact that her writings were re-printed in America afforded her the greatest gratification, while it was a surprise to her.
She was a delightful person to meet socially, having charming ways and a soft, sweet voice. She died in a wee bit of a house, in 1855, at the age of sixty-eight.
Do you ask why I have chosen to place Miss Mitford in our list of Remarkable Women? To begin with, she was the first to discover and set before us in prose writing the beauty in every-day things. She had written poems and tried her hand at writing tragedy, but with indifferent success, and at length when poverty stared her in the face she took up the then new line of writing and tried with grand success to show to the world the beauty there is in common things. Then all through her long life with its sad changes she kept that wonderful serenity of mind, and that happy faculty of living above the vexations of life. Many a woman when forced by growing poverty to move from place to place, each time going to a poorer home, would have grown faint and weary of life, and given up in despair.
If we cultivate the habit of making the best of everything, we shall be the better prepared to meet the vicissitudes of life.
I SHOULD suggest, dear Pansies, for this lovely month of May, a little evening festival. Winter is over with its long, delightfully cosey evenings. Spring is nearly done, with its shorter evenings, and now we are fairly launched into the flower months--when all life seems an holiday, and every moment that is possible is to be passed out of doors.
To get ready for my little proposed festival, everybody must go a-Maying. With baskets, and fern cases, let the children, papa and mamma, nursey, aunt Grace, uncle Fred, and indeed every one who will drop books and work, and go off to the woods for the wild treasures that are playing hide-and-seek there. We do not want on this lovely May festival, any flowers but wild ones that have grown silently all winter under the snow, waiting for us. Their reign is short indeed. We will give them one evening all to themselves before we turn to June with her wealth of roses, and all other sweet and glowing blossoms.