Lives of Girls Who Became Famous | Page 6

copies have been sold in Great Britain and her colonies, and probably an equal or greater number in this country. There have been twelve French editions, eleven German, and six Spanish. It has been published in nineteen different languages,--Russian, Hungarian, Armenian, Modern Greek, Finnish, Welsh, Polish, and others. In Bengal the book is very popular. A lady of high rank in the court of Siam, liberated her slaves, one hundred and thirty in number, after reading this book, and said, "I am wishful to be good like Harriet Beecher Stowe, and never again to buy human bodies, but only to let them go free once more." In France the sale of the Bible was increased because the people wished to read the book Uncle Tom loved so much.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, like Les Miser��bles, and a few other novels, will live, because written with a purpose. No work of fiction is permanent without some great underlying principle or object.
Soon after the Civil War, Mrs. Stowe bought a home among the orange groves of Florida, and thither she goes each winter, with her family. She has done much there for the colored people whom she helped to make free. With the proceeds of some public readings at the North she built a church, in which her husband preached as long as his health permitted. Her home at Mandarin, with its great moss-covered oaks and profusion of flowers, is a restful and happy place after these most fruitful years.
Her summer residence in Hartford, Conn., beautiful without, and artistic within, has been visited by thousands, who honor the noble woman not less than the gifted author.
Many of the Beecher family have died; Lyman Beecher at eighty-three, and Catharine at seventy-eight. Some of Mrs. Stowe's own children are waiting for her in the other country. She says, "I am more interested in the other side of Jordan than this, though this still has its pleasures."
On Mrs. Stowe's seventy-first birthday, her publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., gave a garden party in her honor, at the hospitable home of Governor Claflin and his wife, at Newton, Mass. Poets and artists, statesmen and reformers, were invited to meet the famous author. On a stage, under a great tent, she sat, while poems were read and speeches made. The brown curls had become snowy white, and the bright eyes of girlhood had grown deeper and more earnest. The manner was the same as ever, unostentatious, courteous, kindly.
Her life is but another confirmation of the well-known fact, that the best work of the world is done, not by the loiterers, but by those whose hearts and hands are full of duties. Mrs. Stowe died about noon, July 1, 1896, of paralysis, at Hartford, Conn., at the age of eighty-five. She passed away as if to sleep, her son, the Rev. Charles Edward Stowe, and her daughters, Eliza and Harriet, standing by her bedside. Since the death of her husband, Professor Calvin E. Stowe, in 1886, Mrs. Stowe had gradually failed physically and mentally. She was buried July 3 in the cemetery connected with the Theological Seminary at Andover, Mass., between the graves of her husband and her son, Henry. The latter was drowned in the Connecticut River, while a member of Dartmouth College, July 19, 1857.

HELEN HUNT JACKSON.
[Illustration: HELEN HUNT JACKSON.]
Thousands were saddened when, Aug. 12, 1885, it was flashed across the wires that Helen Hunt Jackson was dead. The Nation said, "The news will probably carry a pang of regret into more American homes than similar intelligence in regard to any other woman, with the possible exception of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe."
How, with the simple initials, "H.H.," had she won this place in the hearts of the people? Was it because she was a poet? Oh no! many persons of genius have few friends. It was because an earnest life was back of her gifted writings. A great book needs a great man or woman behind it to make it a perfect work. Mrs. Jackson's literary work will be abiding, but her life, with its dark shadow and bright sunlight, its deep affections and sympathy with the oppressed, will furnish a rich setting for the gems of thought which she gave to the world.
Born in the cultured town of Amherst, Mass., Oct. 18, 1831, she inherited from her mother a sunny, buoyant nature, and from her father, Nathan W. Fiske, professor of languages and philosophy in the college, a strong and vigorous mind. Her own vivid description of the "naughtiest day in my life," in St. Nicholas, September and October, 1880, shows the ardent, wilful child who was one day to stand out fearlessly before the nation and tell its statesmen the wrong they had done to "her Indians."
She and her younger sister Annie were allowed one April