its long windows, and rich in gifts of pictures, statuary, and books from celebrated friends, Florence Nightingale, Charles Darwin, Jacob Bright, H. Crabbe Robinson, Lady Byron, Mrs. Carlyle, and others.

When the mother of the noble Col. Robert G. Shaw, the first white colonel of the first black regiment raised during our Civil War, sent her son's picture to Miss Martineau, it was hung in a conspicuous place. "It always melts my heart to look at it," she said; "and think of that great deed that proved two races worthy of each other, and helped to save your land for both!”

Col. Shaw fell in the attack upon Fort Wagner, on the night of July 18, 1863. As his regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, rushed on the double-quick to the charge, his last words were, "We shall take the fort or die there." He was shot through the heart. The next morning the dead and dying were found piled three feet deep upon each other. Col. Shaw was buried among the black soldiers, who showed that day that they were brave enough and true enough to stand among the free forever.

Opposite this drawing-room was the study, used also as a dining-room, the walls covered with books on art, education, political economy, philosophy, theology, and general literature; dictionaries, encyclopedias, annuals, hand-books, in short, whatever a gifted and unusual mind could need for its work.

Back of these two rooms was the only other room on the ground floor, the large, sunny kitchen, with its library for servants-a feature which wisely might be copied in other homes.

Above, the sleeping rooms were as airy and cheerful as those below. Here George Eliot, Emerson, Charlotte Bronté, and other noted men and women had been her

guests. From here the brilliant, lonely genius from Haworth, the author of "Jane Eyre," wrote to her sister Emily: "Her [Miss Martineau's] visitors enjoy the most perfect liberty; what she claims for herself she allows them. I rise at my own hour, breakfast alone. . . . I pass the morning in the drawing-room, she in her study. At two o'clock we meet, talk and walk till five, - her dinner hour, spend the evening together, when she converses fluently and abundantly, and with the most complete frankness. I go to my room soon after ten, and she sits up writing letters. She appears exhaustless in strength and spirits, and indefatigable in the faculty of labor: she is a great and good woman."

Why do thousands, year after year, visit the home of Harriet Martineau? Because she was, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson truly says, "in many respects the ablest and most helpful woman whom this century or any century has produced."

Americans will always owe her gratitude and honor for her attitude on slavery a system which the South now disbelieves in not less than the North- and for her deep · interest and aid in the time of our Civil War. The Hon. W. E. Forster, in his great speech at Bradford, England, said that "it seemed as if she alone was keeping the country straight in regard to America."

Harriet Martineau, born June 12, 1802, was descended from the Huguenots, a party of whom, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1688, settled in Norwich, England. Her father, Thomas Martineau, a manufacturer of bombazines and camlets, was a gentle, refined, peaceloving man who, failing in business, died under the stress of pecuniary troubles. "Humble, simple, upright, selfdenying, affectionate to as many people as possible, and

kindly to all," said Harriet in after years," he gave no pain and did all the good he could."

The mother, Elizabeth Rankin, the daughter of a sugar refiner of Newcastle-on-Tyne, was a woman of strong will, dominant temperament, probably rendered less amiable by her husband's losses and the care of eight children, for whom she and her husband, says Harriet in her autobiography, "exercised every kind of selfdenial to bring us up qualified to take care of ourselves. They pinched themselves in luxuries to provide their girls, as well as their boys, with masters and schooling; and they brought us up to an industry like their own; — the boys in study and business, and the girls in study and household cares."

plain and sickly. System and duty There was

Harriet was the sixth child, rather Her childhood was not a happy one. seemed to be the watchwords of the home. little time, and apparently no inclination, for words of endearment or appreciation. The father was too heavily weighted with cares, and the mother too busy teaching her family how to sew and to cook, and to spend every minute in work. Time for everything but love!

Mrs. Martineau was devoted to her children as far as working for them was concerned, but instead of caresses, she used that sharpest of all weapons, sarcasm, which cuts both ways, the user and the one on whom it is used.

When Harriet was sent with sarcastic messages to the maids, such as "Bid them not to be so like cart-horses overhead," she says, "It was impossible to give such an one as that: so I used to linger and delay to the last moment, and then deliver something civil, with all imaginable sheepishness, so that the maids used to look at one another and laugh."