If you knew the whole story you would not envy my power of driving about so much.  You can lie down and sleep when you please; I must earn my sleep by hard work, which uses up so much time that I wonder I ever accomplish anything.  I believe that God arranges our various burdens and fits them to our backs, and that He sets off a loss against a gain, so that while some seem more favored than others, the mere aspect deceives.  I have to make it my steady object throughout each day, so to spend time and strength as to obtain sleep enough to carry me through the next; it is thus I have acquired the habit of taking a large amount of exercise, which keeps me out of doors when I am longing to be at work within.  You say I seem to be always in a flood of joy; well, that too is seems.  I think I know what joy in God means, though perhaps I only begin to know; but I am a weak creature; I fall into snares and get entangled—­not nearly so often as I used to do, but still do get into them.  I have a perfect horror of them; the thought of having anything come between God and my soul makes me so restless and uneasy that I hardly know which way to turn.  I have been very much absorbed of late in various interests, and am sure they have contrived to occupy me too much; pressing cares do sometimes, and oh, how ashamed I am!

Do write for young inquirers, if your heart prompts you to do it.  I don’t know what to think of your suggestion that in writing for young converts I should impress it upon them to speak the truth.  It seems to me just like telling them not to commit murder; and that would be absurd.  Do Christians cheat and tell lies?  I have a great aversion to writing about such things; if children are not trained at home to be upright and full of integrity, it can’t be that books can rectify that loss.  You may reply that home-training is defective in thousands of cases; yes, that is true, but I have a feeling that truth and honesty must spring from a soil early prepared for them, and that a young person who is in the habit of falsehood is not a Christian and needs to go back to first principles.  I can’t endure subterfuges, misrepresentation, and the like; the whole foundation looks wrong when people indulge themselves in them, and to say to a Christian, “I hope you are truthful,” is to my mind as if I should say to him, “I hope you wash your face and hands every day.”  Now if your observation says I am wrong, let’s know; I am open to conviction.

To Mrs. H. B. Smith, New York, May 24, 1869.

It has just come to me that the true way to enjoy writing and to have you enjoy hearing, is to keep a sort of journal, where little things will have a chance to speak for themselves.