The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

568

THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

localities of the city make money; others lose; but on an
average, Coffee House stock was paying ten per cent. when
I was in Birmingham. They are morally beneficial to the
community, and do much for the education and general improvement of workingmen and women. They are rivals to
the public houses, and provide the club-house for temperance
workingmen and women, which the drinking man claims he
finds in the saloon and gin-palace.
We happened to be in London when Rev. Dr. James
Martineau, the great Unitarian divine of England, delivered
his last sermon in Portland Street Chapel, - a very remarkable discourse to be delivered at any time of a man's life, but
still more remarkable in consideration of Dr. Martineau's
advanced age. It was almost as great a pleasure to meet
Rev Mr. Gaskell, whose wife was Charlotte Bront6's biographer He assisted in the preliminary services. I sought
an interview with the venerable clergyman, with whose deceased wife I had corresponded, during the period when she
was the historian of the Bront&s, and afterwards met Dr.
Martineau in his own home. The large, ripe scholarship
of one, and the Christian courtesy and charity of both, that
added lustre and serenity to their old age, was the logical
result of glorious living through a long term of years.
As I listened to them, and admiringly observed them, an
undertone of petition was running through my thoughts,"May my last days be like theirs!"
"Do not mention the woman question in your talk with
Dr. Martineau," was the advice given me by one of his
friends; " it is an unpleasant topic to him on account of the
long estrangement from him of his sister Harriet, and of
circumstances connected with it." I was well acquainted
with the details of that sad alienation, and needed no caution
to avoid even a remote allusion to it.