“I did, notwithstanding.  One busy morning I opened one of her long, complaining, badly-written letters; I could scarcely decipher it; she was so near-sighted, too, poor child, and would not put on glasses.  Her letters were something of a trial to me.  I read, almost to my consternation, ’I have been praying for a letter from you for three weeks.’  Slipping the unsightly sheet back into the envelope, hastily, rather too hastily, I’m afraid, I said to myself:  ’Well, I don’t see how you will get it.’  I was busy every hour in those days, I did not have to rest as often as I do now, and how could I spare the hour her prayer was demanding?  I could find the time in a week or ten days, but she had prayed for it yesterday and would expect it to-day, would pray for it to-day and expect it to-morrow.  ’Why could she not pray about it without telling me?’ I argued as I dipped my pen in the ink, not to write to her but to answer a letter that must be answered that morning.  I argued about it to myself as I turned from one thing to another, working in nervous haste; for I did more in those days than God required me to do, I served myself instead of serving him.  I was about to take up a book to look over a poem that I was to read at our literary circle when words from somewhere arrested me:  ’Do you like to have the answer to a prayer of yours put off and off in this way?’ and I answered aloud, ’No, I don’t.’  ‘Then answer this as you like to have God answer you.’  And I sighed, you will hardly believe it, but I did sigh.  The enticing poem went down and two sheets of paper came up and I wrote the letter for which the poor thing a hundred miles away had been praying three weeks.  I tried to make it cordial, spirited and sympathetic, for that was the kind she was praying for.  And it went to the mail four hours after I had received her letter.”

“I’m so glad,” said sympathetic Linnet.  “How glad she must have been!”

“Not as glad as I was when I saw her death in the paper yesterday.”

“You do write to so many people,” said Marjorie.

“I counted my list yesterday as I wrote on it the fifty-third name.”

“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Linnet, who “hated” to write letters.  “What do you do it for?”

“Perhaps because they need letters, perhaps because I need to write them.  My friends have a way of sending me the names of any friendless child, or girl, or woman, who would be cheered by a letter, and I haven’t the heart to refuse, especially as some of them pray for letters and give thanks for them.  Instead of giving my time to ‘society’ I give it to letter writing.  And the letters I have in return!  Nothing in story books equals the pathos and romance of some of them.”

“I like that kind of good works,” said Marjorie, “because I’m too bashful to talk to people and I can write anything.”

How little the child knew that some day she would write anything and everything because she was “too bashful to talk.”  How little any of us know what we are being made ready to do.  And how we would stop to moan and weep in very self-pity if we did know, and thus hinder the work of preparation from going on.