In April, 1884, my friend and I quitted London, having permanently let our house in South Kensington to Mrs. Kemble. The strain of London life had become too great for me, and advancing years and narrowed income together counselled retreat in good time. I continued then and ever since, of course, to work for the Anti-vivisection cause; but I resigned my Honorary Secretaryship, June 26th, 1884, and left the entire charge of the office and of editing the Zoophilist to Mr. Bryan.^[35]

A few months later I was disturbed to hear that the Hon. Stephen Coleridge (Lord Coleridge’s second son) who had always been particularly kind and considerate towards me, had started a fund to form a farewell testimonial to me from my fellow-workers. Mr. Coleridge addressed our leading members and friends in the following letter:—

“At the general meeting of the Victoria Street and International Societies for the Total Abolition of Vivisection, on the 26th June, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, for reasons set forth in the annual report, gave in her resignation of the post of Honorary Secretary, and it was accepted with deep reluctance.

“The executive committee, meeting shortly afterwards unanimously passed a resolution to the effect that the occasion ought not to be passed over by the Society unrecognised, and a list of subscribers to a testimonial for Miss Cobbe has been opened. The object of this letter is to acquaint you of these facts and to afford you the opportunity of adding your name to the list should you desire to do so.

“Year after year from the foundation of the Societies and before, Miss Cobbe has fought against the practice of the torture of animals with constant earnestness, conspicuous power, and enthusiasm born of a noble cause.

“That testimonials are too plentiful it may perhaps be urged with truth; but many of us who deprecate the practice of Vivisection feel that such a life as this, of honour and devotion, were it to stand unrecognised and unacknowledged, would mark us as entirely ungrateful.

In a short space of time, I was told, a thousand pounds was collected; and it was kindly and thoughtfully expended in buying me an annuity of £100 a year. The amount of labour and trouble which all these arrangements must have cost Mr. Stephen Coleridge must have been very great indeed, and only most genuine kindness of heart and regard for me could have induced him to undertake them. I was very much startled when I heard of this gift and very unwilling to accept it, as in some degree taking away the pleasurable sense I had had of working all along gratuitously for the poor beasts, and of having sacrificed for some years nearly all my literary earnings to devote myself to their cause. My objections were over-ruled by friendly insistence, and Lord Shaftesbury presented the Testimonial to me in the following letter:—

“The Committee of the Anti-vivisection Society, and other contributors, have assigned to me the agreeable duty of requesting you to do them the kindness and the honour, to accept the accompanying Testimonial.

“It expresses, I can assure you, their deep and real sense of the vast services you have rendered to the world, by the devotion of your time, your talents and indefatigable zeal, to the assertion of principles which, though primarily brought into action for the benefit and protection of the inferior orders of the Creation, are of paramount importance to the honour and security of the whole Human Race.

“We heartily pray that you may enjoy all health and happiness in your retirement, which, we trust, will be but temporary. We shall frequently ask the aid of your counsels and live in hope of your speedy return to active exertion, in the career in which you have laboured so vigorously, and which you so sincerely love.

I acknowledged Lord Shaftesbury’s letter as follows:—

“I find it very difficult to express to you the feelings with which I have just read your letter, and received the noble gift which accompanied it. You and all the good friends and fellow-workers who have thus done me honour and kindness will have added much to the material comfort and enjoyment of such years as may remain to me; but you have done still more for me, by filling my heart with the happy sense of being cared for.

“That you should estimate such work as I have been able to do so highly as your letter expresses, while it far surpasses anything I can myself think I have accomplished, yet makes me very proud and very thankful to God.

“Whatever has been done by me in the way of raising up opposition to scientific cruelty has been attained only because I had the inestimable advantage of being supported and guided by you from first to last, and aided step by step by the unwearied sympathy and co-operation of my dear and generous fellow-labourers.

“These words are very inadequate to convey my thanks to you for this gift and all your past goodness towards me, and those which I would fain offer through you to the Committee and all the Subscribers to this splendid Testimonial; especially to the Hon. Secretary, who has undertaken the great trouble which the collection of it must have involved. I can but repeat, I thank you and them with my whole heart.

This addition to my little income made up for certain losses which I had incurred, and raised it to about its original moderate level, enabling me to share the expenses of our Welsh cottage. I was, however, of course, a poor woman, and not in a position to help my friend to live (as we both earnestly desired to do) in her larger house in Hengwrt. We made an effort to arrange it so, loving the place and enjoying the beauty of the woods and gardens exceedingly. But we knew it could not be our permanent home; and a suitable tenant having come on the field, offering to take it for a term of years which would naturally reach beyond our lives, we felt that the end of our possession was drawing near. I was very sorrowful for my own sake, and still more for that of my friend who had always had peculiar attachment to the place. I reflected painfully that if I had been only a little better off, she might not have been obliged to relinquish her proper home.

All this was occupying me much. It was a Thursday morning, and the gentleman who proposed to become the tenant of Hengwrt was to come on Monday to make a definite offer which,—once accepted,—would have been held to bind my friend.

I went downstairs into the old oak hall in the morning and opened the post-bag. Among the large packet of letters which usually awaits me there was one from a solicitor in Liverpool. I knew that my kind old friend Mrs. Yates had died the week before, and I had been informed that she had left me her residuary legatee; but I imagined her to be in narrow circumstances, and that a few hundreds would be the uttermost of my possible inheritance; not sufficient, at all events, to affect appreciably my available income. I opened the Solicitor’s letter very coolly and found myself to be,—so far as all my wants and wishes extend,—a rich woman.

The story of this legacy is a very touching one. I never saw or heard of Mrs. Yates till a few years before her death, and when she was already very aged. She began by sending large and generous donations of £50, and £80, at a time to our Society. Later, she came up from Liverpool to London when I was managing affairs without a Secretary, and, finding me at the office, she gave me a still larger donation, actually in bank-notes. She was an Unitarian, or rather a Theist, like myself; and having taken very warm interest in my books, she seemed to be drawn to me by a double sympathy, both on account of religious sympathies, and those we shared on behalf of the vivisected animals. Of course I explained to her the details of my work, and she took the warmest interest in it. After I resigned my office of Honorary Secretary, she seemed to prefer to give her principal contributions personally to me to expend for the cause according to my judgment, and twice she sent me large sums, with strictest injunction to keep her name, and even the locality of the donor, secret. I called these gifts my Trust Fund, and made grants from it to working allies all over the world. I also spent a great deal of it in printing large quantities of papers. Of course I began by sending her a balance sheet of my expenditure; but this she forbade me to repeat, so I could only from time to time write her long letters (copied for me by my friend as my writing taxed her sight), telling her all we were doing. At last she came to see us here in answer to our repeated invitations, but could not be persuaded to stop more than one night. Talking to me out walking, she asked me: “Would I take charge of some money she wished to leave for protection of animals in Liverpool?” I answered that I could not engage to do this, and begged her to entrust it (as she eventually did) to some friend resident in the place. Then she said shyly: “Well, you do not object to my leaving you something for yourself—to my making you my residuary legatee?” adding to the question some words of affection. Of course I could only press her hand and say I was grateful for her kind thought. She did it all so simply, that, being prepossessed with the idea that she was in rather narrow circumstances, and that she had already given me the savings of her lifetime in the Trust Fund, it never even occurred to me that this residuary legateeship could be an important matter, after she had provided (as she was sure to do) for all legitimate claims upon her. Nothing could exceed my astonishment when I found how large was the sum bequeathed in this unpretending way. My friend thought I must be ill from the difficulty I seem to have found in commanding my voice to tell her the strange news when she came into the hall, a quarter of an hour after I had read that epoch-making letter!

Certainly never was a great gift made with such perfect delicacy. Mrs. Yates had taken care that I should have no reason, so long as she lived, to suppose myself under any personal obligation to her. Since then, it may be believed that my heart has never ceased to cherish her memory with tender gratitude, and to associate the thought of her with all the comforts of the home which her wealth has secured for me.

Mrs. Yates, at the time I knew her, had been for thirty or forty years the widow of Mr. Richard Vaughan Yates, a Liverpool Merchant. The following obituary notice of her appeared in the Zoophilist, November 2nd, 1891. I may add that beside her personal legacy to me (given simply by her will to “her friend Miss Frances Power Cobbe,” without comment of any kind) Mrs. Yates gave £1,000 to the Victoria Street Society, as well as £1,000 to the Liverpool Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; both bequests being over and above legacies to her executors, relatives and dependents:—

“The Victoria Street Society and the cause of Anti-vivisection have lost their most generous supporter in Mrs. Richard Yates, of Liverpool; a good and noble woman if ever there were one. Born in humble circumstances, she was one of the truest gentlewomen who ever lived. Her wide cultivation of mind, broadly liberal but deeply religious spirit and sound, clear judgment, remained conspicuous even in extreme old age. The hearts of those whom she aided in their toil for the poor brutes, with a generosity only equalled by the delicacy of its manifestations, will ever keep her memory in tender and grateful respect.”

A warmly-feeling article in the Inquirer, October 10th, 1891, known to be by her friend and pastor, Rev. Valentine Davies, gave the following sketch of her life. It is due to her whose generosity has so brightened my later years, that my autobiography should contain some such record of her goodness and usefulness.

“On Thursday evening, October 1st, there passed peacefully away one who was the last of her generation; bearing a name honoured in Liverpool since the Rev. John Yates, in the latter part of last century and the early years of this, ministered in Paradise Street Chapel, and his sons took their places in the first rank of the merchants and philanthropic citizens of the town. Anne Simpson was born November 10th, 1805, and to the last retained happy recollections of her childhood’s home, a simple cottage in the pleasant Cheshire country. She married, in the midsummer of 1832, Mr. Richard Vaughan Yates, having first spent a year (for purposes of education) in the household of Dr. Lant Carpenter, at Bristol, of whom she always spoke with great veneration. Richly endowed with natural grace and delicacy of feeling, true nobility of heart, and great simplicity, sustained by earnest religious feeling and a strong sense of duty, there was never happier choice than this, which gave to Mrs. Yates the larger opportunities of wealth and freedom in society. She shared her husband’s interest in many philanthropic labours, his care for the Harrington Schools, founded by his father, and for the Liverpool Institute, his pleasure and his anxieties in the making of the Prince’s Park, opened in 1849, as his gift to the town. She shared also to the full his delight in works of art and in foreign travel. The late Rev. Charles Wicksteed published some charming reminiscences of one of their Italian journeys; and still more notable was that journey through Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, recorded by Miss Harriet Martineau in her Eastern Travel.

“Since her husband’s death, in 1856, Mrs. Yates has stood bravely alone, living very quietly, but keenly alive to all the interests of the world, with ardent sympathy for every righteous cause, and generous help ever ready for public needs as for private charity. No one will ever know the full measure of her acts of kindness, her care for the least defended, her many quiet ways of doing good. She was a great lover of dumb creatures, and felt a passionate indignation at every kind of cruelty. Four-footed waifs and strays often found a pleasant refuge in her house, and for many years she was an active worker for the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The cabmen and donkey-boys of Liverpool at their annual suppers have long been familiar with her kindly face and gracious word, and many a time has her intrepid protest checked an act of cruelty in the public streets. The friend of Frances Power Cobbe, she took a deep and painful interest in the work of the Victoria Street Society for the Suppression of Vivisection, and sustained its work through many years by generous gifts. Herself a solitary woman in these later years, it was to the solitary and defenceless that her sympathies most quickly went. She desired for women larger powers to defend their own helplessness, to share in government for the amelioration of society, and to share also in the world’s work. She had a surprising energy and persistence of will in attending to her own affairs and doing the unselfish work she had most at heart. With a plain tenacity to the duty that was clear, she went out to the last, whenever it was possible, to vote at every election where she had a vote to give, and to attend meetings of a political and useful social character. Hers was a life of great unselfishness and true humility. Suffering most of all through sympathy with others, she longed for more light to dissipate the darker shadows of the world. And she herself, wherever it was possible to her patient faithfulness and generous kindness, drove away the darkness, praying thus the best of prayers, and making light and gladness in innumerable hearts.

“After only a few days of illness she fell asleep. A memorial service was held on Sunday last in the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth, where for many years she regularly worshipped. The Rev. V. D. Davis preached the sermon, and also on the following day, at the Birkenhead Flaybrick Hill Cemetery, spoke the words of faith at her grave.”—Inquirer, October 10th.

I have erected over her last resting-place (as I learned that she disliked heavy horizontal tombstones), a large upright slab of polished red Aberdeen granite. After her name and the dates of her birth and death, Shakespeare’s singularly appropriate line is inscribed on the stone:—

On receiving that eventful Thursday morning the news of the unlooked-for riches which had fallen to my lot, our first act was naturally to telegraph to the would-be tenant that “another offer” (to wit mine!) “had been accepted for Hengwrt.” The miseries of house-letting and home-leaving were over for us, we trust, so long as our lives may last.

There is not much more to be told in this last chapter of my story. The expansion of life in many directions which wealth brings with it, is as easy and pleasant as the contraction of it by poverty is the reverse. Yet I have not altered the opinion I formed long ago when I became poor after my father’s death, that the importance we commonly attach to pecuniary conditions is somewhat exaggerated, (so long as a competence is left) and that other things,—for example, the possession of good walking powers, or of strong eyesight or of good hearing, not to speak of the still more precious things of the affections and spirit,—are larger elements, by far, in human happiness than that which riches contributes thereto. Of course I have been very glad of this unlooked-for wealth in my old age. I have felt, first and before all things else, the immense satisfaction of being able to help the Anti-vivisection cause in all parts of the world while I live, and to provide for some further continuance of such help after I die. And next to this I have rejoiced that the comfort and repose of our beautiful and beloved home is secured to my friend and myself.

The friendly reader who has travelled with me through the journey of my three-score years and ten, from my singularly happy childhood in my old home at Newbridge to this far bourne on the road, will now, I hope, leave me with kindly wishes for a peaceful evening, and a not-too-distant curfew bell; in this dear old house, and with my beloved friend for companion.

The photograph of Hengwrt, which will be inserted in these last pages, gives a good idea of the house itself, but can convey none of the beauty of the rivers, woods and mountains all round. No spot in the kingdom I think, not even in the lovely Lake country, unites so many elements of beauty as this part of Wales. The mountains are not very lofty,—even glorious Cader where the giant Idris, (so says the legend) sat in the rocky “chair” (Cader) on the summit and studied the stars,—is trifling compared to Alpine height, and a molehill to Andes and Himalayas; yet is its form, and that of all these Cambrian rocks, so majestic, and their tilt so great, that no one could treat them as merely hills, or liken them to Irish mountains which resemble banks of rainclouds on the horizon. The deep, true, purple heather and the emerald-green fern robe these Welsh mountains in summer in regal splendour of colouring; and in autumn wrap them in rich russet brown cloaks. Down between every chain and ridge rush brooks, always bright and clear, and in many places leaping into lovely waterfalls. The “broad and brawling Mawddach” runs through all the valley from heights far out of sight, till, just below Hengwrt, it meets the almost equally beautiful stream of the Wnion, and the two together wind their way through the tidal estuary out into the sea at “Aber-mawddach” or “Abermaw,”—in English “Barmouth,” eight miles to the west. On both north and south of the valley and on the sides of the mountains, are woods, endless woods, of oak and larch and Scotch fir, interspersed with sycamore, wild cherry, horse-chestnut, elm, holly, and an occasional beech. Never was there a country in which were to be found growing freely and almost wild, so many different kinds of trees, creating of course the loveliest wood-scenery and variety of colouring. The oaks and elms and sycamores which grow in Hengwrt itself, are the oldest and some of the finest in this part of Wales; and here also flourish the largest laurels and rhododendrons I have ever seen anywhere. The luxuriance of their growth, towering high on each side of the avenue and in the shrubberies is a constant subject of astonishment to our visitors. The blossoms of the rhodos are sometimes twenty or twenty-five feet from the ground; and the laurels almost resemble forest trees. It has been one of my chief pleasures here to prune and clip and clear the way for these beautiful shrubs. Through the midst of them all, from one end of the place to the other, rushes the dearest little brook in the world, singing away constantly in so human a tone that over and over again I have paused in my labours of saw and clippers, and said to myself: “There must be some one talking in that walk! It is a lady’s voice, too! It can’t be only the brook this time!” But the brook it has always proved to be on further investigation.

Of the interior of this dear old home I shall not write now. It is interesting from its age,—one of the oak-panelled rooms contains a bed placed there at the dissolution of the neighbouring monastery of Cymmer Abbey,—but it is not in the least a gloomy house; altogether the reverse. The drawing-room commands a view to right and left of almost the whole valley of the Mawddach for nine or ten miles; and just opposite lies the pretty village of Llanelltyd, at the foot of the wooded hills which rise up behind it to the heights of Moel Ispry and Cefn Cam. It is a panorama of splendid scenery, not darkening the room, but making one side of it into a great picture full of exquisite details of old stone bridge and ruined abbey, rivers, woods, and rocks.

Among the objects in that wide view, and also in the still more extensive one from my bedroom above, is the little ivy-covered church of Llanelltyd; and below it a bit of ground sloping to the westering sun, dotted over with grey and white stones where “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” together with a few others who have been our friends and neighbours. There, in that quiet enclosure, will, in all probability, be the bourne of my long journey of life, with a grey headstone for the “Finis” of the last chapter of the Book which I have first lived, and now have written.

I hope that the reader, who perhaps may drive some day along the road below, in the enjoyment of an autumn holiday in this lovely land, will cast a glance upon that churchyard, and give a kindly thought to me when I have gone to rest.

The grey granite stone is standing already in Llanelltyd burying ground, though my place beneath it still waits for me. The friend who made my life so happy when I wrote the last pages of this book, and who had then done so for thirty-four blessed years,—lies there, under the rose trees and the mignonette; alone, till I may be laid beside her.

It would be some poor comfort to me in my loneliness to write here some little account of Mary Charlotte Lloyd, and to describe her keen, highly-cultivated intellect, her quick sense of humour, her gifts as sculptor and painter (the pupil and friend of John Gibson and of Rosa Bonheur); her practical ability and strict justice in the administration of her estate; above all to speak of her character, “cast”—as one who knew her from childhood said,—“in an heroic mould,” of fortitude and loftiness; her absolute unselfishness in all things large and small. But the reticence which belonged to the greatness of her nature made her always refuse to allow me to lead her into the more public life whereto my work necessarily brought me, and in her last sacred directions she forbids me to commemorate her by any written record. Only, then, in the hearts of the few who really knew her must her noble memory live.

I wrote the following lines to her some twenty-five years ago when spending a few days away from her and our home in London. I found them again after her death among her papers. They have a doubled meaning for me now, when the time has come for me to need her most of all.

God has given me two priceless benedictions in life;—in my youth a perfect Mother; in my later years, a perfect Friend. No other gifts, had I possessed them, Genius, or beauty, or fame, or the wealth of the Indies, would have been worthy to compare with the joy of those affections. To live in companionship, almost unbroken by separation and never marred by a doubt or a rough word, with a mind in whose workings my own found inexhaustible interest, and my heart its rest; a friend who knew me better than any one beside could ever know me, and yet,—strange to think!—could love me better than any other,—this was happiness for which, even now that it is over, I thank God from the depths of my soul. I thank Him that I have had such a Friend. And I thank Him that she died without prolonged suffering or distress, with her head resting on my breast and her hand pressing mine; calm and courageous to the last. Her old physician said when all was over: “I have seen many, a great many, men and women die; but I never saw one die so bravely.”

It has been possible for me through the kindness of my friend’s sister, to whom Hengwrt now belongs, to obtain for my remaining months or years a lease of this dear old house and beautiful grounds; and my winters of entire solitude, and summers, when a few friends and relations gather round me, glide rapidly away. I am still struggling on, as my friend bade me (literally with her dying breath), working for the cause of the science-tortured brutes, and I have even spoken again in public, and written many pamphlets and letters for the press. I hope, as Tennyson told me to do, to “fight the good fight” quite to the end. But there is a price which every aged heart perforce must pay for the long enjoyment of one soul-satisfying affection. When that affection is lost, it must be evermore lonely.