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prayer and sermon of Henry Powers of New York.
The decided spiritual tone of the prayer made me feel that I must try to take, every day, this energetic attitude of moral will and purpose, even if I fail in much that I wish to do.”
On May 27 she writes:--
“My birthday.
Fifty-five years old. Still face to face with the mercies of God in health and sanity, enjoying all true pleasures more than ever and weaned from some false ones.
I feel a great lassitude, probably from my cold and yesterday's fatigue.
I have not worked this year as I did the year before, yet I have worked a good deal, too, and perhaps have tried more to fulfil the duty nearest at hand.... I thank God for my continued life, health, and comfort. ... I ask to see Samana free before I go.... ‘Thy will be done’ is the true prayer.”
Samana was not to be free, spite of the efforts of its friends, and she was not to see it again.
The record of this year and the next is a chronicle of arduous work, with the added and ever-deepening note of anxiety; it was only for a time that the visit to Samana checked the progress of the Doctor's physical failure.
He was able in the summer of 1874 to write the forty-third report of the Perkins Institution: an important one in which he reviewed his whole work among the blind.
He felt that this would probably be his last earthly task; yet the following summer found him again taking up the familiar work, laboring with what little strength was left him, and when eyes and hand refused to answer the call of the spirit, dictating
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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