had misshapen features, but that an exquisite smile was on the dead
face. It must have been so. She "had a beautiful soul," as Emerson
said of Longfellow. Poverty disfigured the apple woman's garret, and
want made it wretched, nevertheless, God's most beautiful angels
hovered over it. Her life was a blossom event in London's history.
Social reform has felt her influence. Like a broken vase the perfume
of her being will sweeten literature and society a thousand years after
we are gone.

The Greek poet says men knew when the goddess came to Thebes because of
the blessings she left in her track. Her footprints were not in the
sea, soon obliterated, nor in the snow, quickly melting, but in fields
and forests. This unseen friend, passing by the tree blackened by a
thunderbolt, stayed her step; lo! the woodbine sprang up and covered
the tree's nakedness. She lingered by the stagnant pool--the pool
became a flowing spring. She rested upon a fallen log--from decay and
death came moss, the snowdrop and the anemone. At the crossing of the
brook were her footprints; not in mud downward, but in violets that
sprang up in her pathway. O beautiful prophecy! literally fulfilled
2,000 years afterward in the life of the London apple woman, whose
atmosphere sweetened bitter hearts and made evil into good.

Wealth and eminent position witness not less powerfully the
transforming influence of exalted characters. "My lords," said
Salisbury, "the reforms of this century have been chiefly due to the
presence here of one man--Lord Shaftesbury. The genius of his life was
expressed when last he addressed you. He said: 'When I feel age
creeping upon me I am deeply grieved, for I cannot bear to go away and
leave the world with so much misery in it.'" So long as Shaftesbury
lived, England beheld a standing rebuke of all wrong and injustice.