Her pen seemed to be a veritable part of herself; and the instant it began to move, her face glowed with eager and pleasurable feeling.  “A kitten (she wrote to a maiden friend) a kitten without a tail to play with, a mariner without a compass, a bird without wings, a woman without a husband (and fifty-five at that!) furnish faint images of the desolation of my heart without a pen.”  But although she wrote very fast, she never began to write without careful study and premeditation when her subject required it.

About this time The Little Preacher appeared.  The scene of the story is laid in the Black Forest.  Before writing it she spent a good deal of time in the Astor Library, reading about peasant life in Germany.  In a letter from a literary friend this little work is thus referred to: 

I want to tell you what a German gentleman said to me the other day about your “Little Preacher.”  He was talking with me of German peasant life, and inquired if I had read your charming story.  He was delighted to find I knew you, and exclaimed enthusiastically:  “I wish I knew her!  I would so like to thank her for her perfect picture.  It is a miracle of genius,” he added, “to be able thus to portray the life of a foreign people.”  He is very intelligent, and so I know you will be pleased with his appreciation of your book.  He said if he were not so poor, he would buy a whole edition of the “Little Preacher” to give to his friends.

During the autumn of this year her sister-in-law, Mrs. Edward Payson, died after a lingering, painful illness.  The following letter, dated October 28, was written to her shortly before her departure: 

I have been so engrossed with sympathy for Edward and your children, that I have but just begun to realise that you are about entering on a state of felicity which ought, for the time, to make me forget them.  Dear Nelly, I congratulate you with all my heart. Do not let the thought of what those who love you must suffer in your loss, diminish the peace and joy with which God now calls you to think only of Himself and the home He has prepared for you.  Try to leave them to His kind, tender care.  He loves them better than you do; He can be to them more than you have been; He will hear your prayers and all the prayers offered for them, and as one whom his mother comforteth, so will He comfort them.  We, who shall be left here without you, can not conceive the joys on which you are to enter, but we know enough to go with you to the very gates of the city, longing to enter in with you to go no more out.  All your tears will soon be wiped away; you will see the King in His beauty; you will see Christ your Redeemer and realise all He is and all He has done for you; and how many saints whom you have loved on earth will be standing ready to seize you by the hand and welcome you among them!  As I think of these things my soul is in haste to be gone; I long to be set free from sin and self and