It was a rare treat to listen to it, with comments from her interspersed; some of them droll and witty, others full of profound religious feeling.  Now and then, as we queried if something was not improbable or unnatural, she would give us bits of history from her own experience or that of her friends, going to show that stranger things had occurred in real life.  I need not say we insisted on its being finished, feeling sure it would do great good; though I must confess that I do not think either of us, much as we enjoyed it, was fully aware of its great merits.

I was much impressed by her singleness of purpose; her one great desire so evidently being that her writings should help others to know and to love Christ and His truth, that she thought little or nothing of her own reputation.

She went on with her work, occasionally reading to us what she had added.  In those days she always spoke of it as her “Katy book,” no other title having been given to it.  But one morning she came to the breakfast-table with her face all lighted up.  “I’ve got a name for my book,” she exclaimed; “it came to me while I was lying awake last night.  You know Wordsworth’s Stepping Westward?  I am going to call it Stepping Heavenward—­don’t you like it?  I do.”  We all felt it was exactly the right name, and she added, “I think I will put in Wordsworth’s poem as a preface.”

Of the heart-communings on sacred things that made that summer so memorable to me I can not speak; and yet, more than anything else, these gave a distinctive character to our intercourse.  Her faith and love were so ardent and persuading, so much a part of herself, that no one could be with her without recognising their power over her life.  She was interested in everything about her, without a particle of cant, full of playful humor and bright fancies; but the love of Christ was the absorbing interest of her life—­almost a passion, it might be called, so fervent and rapturous was her devotion to Him, so great her longing for communion with Him and for a more complete conformity to His perfect will.

As I have said, all her emotions were intense and her religious affections had the same warmth and glow.  Believing in Christ was to her not so much a duty as the deepest joy of her life, heightening all other joys, and she was not satisfied until her friends shared with her in this experience.  She believed it to be attainable by all, founded on a complete submitting of the human to the Divine will in all things, great and small.

Truly of her it might be said, if of any human being, “she hath loved much.”

To Mrs. Smith, New York, Nov. 16, 1869.