has produced more unmixed pleasure. Their several gifts have created no jealousy nor ambition of management, nor sinister purpose in any trustee to rule or ruin the charity. All rejoice at its judicious management, its gentlemanly trustees, its kind and competent officers, its thirteen happy, industrious, and improving children. Its system of home training and education, of dress and pastimes, of alternate work and play, and of inculcating and applying Christian principles to the practical needs of daily duty, is essentially the same as that which had governed and had been happily illustrated in a similar institution of the city of New York. Long, long may it be before any one shall arise to disturb its harmony, or lessen its prosperity!
The house of the countess's mother, inherited from her first husband, Col. Rolfe, and from his son Paul, who died childless, has been enlarged and converted into the Rolfe and Rumford Asylum, "for the poor and needy, particularly young females without mothers, natives of Concord." The entire bequests, with their accumulations, now amount to more than fifty thousand dollars, and are taken in trust by the city. The countess also bequeathed fifteen thousand dollars to the New-Hampshire Asylum for the Insane; to the Concord Female Charitable Society, two thousand dollars; to the Boston Children's Friend Society, two thousand dollars; to the Fatherless and Widows' Society, Boston, two thousand dollars. And she left ten thousand dollars to the son of her half brother, Joseph Amedie Lefevre, and provided that her legacy of fifteen thousand dollars to found the asylum should revert to him if the city of Concord failed to assume the trust. All the remaining real estate of Col. Rolfe was devised to the Institution. This was duly incorporated by special statute in July, 1872; but the asylum itself was not opened for the reception of beneficiaries till the fifteenth day of January, 1880.
After the count's death, the countess seems to have divided her time between residence in London and her house at Brompton, protracted visits to Paris of two and three years' duration, and to residence in Concord. From July, 1844, she occupied the house and chamber in which she was born. After an eventful life, and while preparing for another visit to France, where she had vested funds, she was taken with the illness of which she died, Dec. 2, 1852, in her seventy-ninth year. Her only companion, and the solace of her declining years, was a young lady, Miss Emma G., a native of Birmingham, whom she had adopted when a child, at Brompton, and who has married Mr. John Burgum of Concord. Thus in family and institutional life, her charity has immortalized the Countess of Rumford.
