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DEATH OF MRS G. O'M. CLARKE.
IT is with deepest regret that we have to
record the death of Mrs. G. O'M. Clarke,
which occurred suddenly in Sydney on Monday
evening. By this sad event, although the
deceased's lady's residence here terminated
years since, some lowly homes at Young will
experience a great loss. it has not often
fallen to us to speak of her many acts of bene-
volence and charity, for the simple reason that
she preferred to do her good work unosten-
tatiously; but we may now say that in the
very earliest days in the history of what was
then known as Lambing Flat, her name,
amongst the poor and distressed, was a house-
hold word, and up to the time when we write
many of the indigent, aged, and sick have been
recipients of her bounty; and no visit was paid
to the district in which for so many years she
lived and laboured without being made an
opportunity to see and minister to those
whom she affectionately called her "poor
people." Old residents on this gold-field will
remember when, in what it would be no
exaggeration to call the "famine season" of
some twenty-three years since, Mrs. Clarke,
then Mrs. Wilkie, made it the great object of
her life to seek out and relieve those whom the
want of luck in gold-mining had left in absolute
need of the common necessaries of life. These
acts, as long as the remembrance of those who
knew her lasts, will always be a record of her
life of active usefulness. But there is another
record, a monument which testifies alike to her
devotion to the memory of the dead, and to
the Church to which she belonged: we mean
the Memorial Church of Saint John, which was
erected as a memento of her first husband,
Captain Wilkie, and mainly with funds col-
lected or contributed by herself, as was also
the school, built subsequently. To return to
the present: Since she went to reside in
Sydney, her life there was characterised by
the same love of active good doing, and to her
exertions, joined to those of other honoured
women, whose hands like hers were always
open to dispense substantial relief where it was
required, may be attributed the existence of the
Home and Training School for Nurses for the
Sick, which we have lately had occasion to
notice, and which, in addition to its staff of
nurses who receive pay from the sick whom
they tend, is now sending out others whose
duty it is to seek out and relieve, with food
and proper attendance, the sick whose poverty
would otherwise place such relief beyond their
reach. All honour to such kind, sympathetic,
benevolent hearts; may it be said to them
when the stand round the Throne, as was
promised by the Great Founder of Christianity
to those who should feed the hungry, give
drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and
visit the sick, "Come, ye blessed of my
Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you
from the foundation of the world."
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