Over in London a noble woman died. God touched her heart and it
stopped its beating; her pulses, and they were still, and they carried
her into one of the greatest auditoriums in the city that people of
great renown might pay her honor in her death. A representative of the
Queen came to see her face. Lords and ladies walked quickly past the
coffin with tear wet cheeks. Finally the poor people were given the
building and they surged a great mass of people through the
auditorium. At last down the aisle there came a poor woman with every
mark of poverty about her dress, a little shawl pinned over her head,
carrying a baby in her arms, and leading an elder child by the hand.
When she reached the coffin she put the baby down, loosed the
handclasp of the elder child, bent over the coffin, and as she did so
the shawl fell back from her head. Stooping thus, she kept back the
crowd that surged behind her, when one of the attendants quietly put
her hand upon her shoulder and said, "Madam, you must move on; you are
stopping the people." She turned and faced the great crowd, pushing
back of her, and lifting her hand, she said: "I will not move on; I
have walked forty miles and carried my baby that I might see this
woman's face. She saved my boys from hell, and I have a right to look
and to weep." And then she bent and covered the glass that was over
the face with her kisses while all the people sobbed in sympathy with
her.
The woman sleeping in the casket was Mrs. Catherine Booth, mother of
the Salvation Army; great, not because her mind was superior to that
of many another woman, nor because her social position was better, but
because she was absolutely surrendered to God, and Christ lived in her