I deeply appreciate the Christian kindness that prompted you to write me in the midst of your sorrow.  I was prepared for the sad news by a dream only last night.  I fancied myself seeing your dear little boy lying very restlessly on his bed, and proposing to carry him about in my arms to relieve him.  He made no objection, and I walked up and down with him a long, long time, when some one of the family took him from me.  Instantly his face was illumined by a wondrous smile of delight that he was to leave the arms of a stranger to go to those familiar to him—­such a smile, that when I awoke this morning I said to myself, “Eddy Field has gone to the arms of his Saviour, and gone gladly.”  You can imagine how your letter, an hour or two later, touched me.  But you have better consolation than dreams can give; in the belief that your child will develop, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, into the perfect likeness of Christ, and in your own submission to the unerring will of God.  I sometimes think that patient sufferers suffer most; they make less outcry than others, but the grief that has little vent wears sorely.

  “Grace does not steel the faithful heart
  That it should feel no ill,”

and you have many a pang yet before you.  It must be so very hard to see twin children part company, to have their paths diverge so soon.  But the shadow of death will not always rest on your home; you will emerge from its obscurity into such a light as they who have never sorrowed can not know.  We never know, or begin to know, the great Heart that loves us best, till we throw ourselves upon it in the hour of our despair.  Friends say and do all they can for us, but they do not know what we suffer or what we need; but Christ, who formed, has penetrated the depths of the mother’s heart.  He pours in the wine and the oil that no human hand possesses, and “as one whom his mother comforteth, so will He comfort you.”  I have lived to see that God never was so good to me as when He seemed most severe.  Thus I trust and believe it will be with you and your husband.  Meanwhile, while the peaceable fruits are growing and ripening, may God help you through the grievous time that must pass—­a grievous time in which you have my warm sympathy.  I know only too well all about it.

  “I know my griefs; but then my consolations,
  My joys, and my immortal hopes I know”—­

joys unknown to the prosperous, hopes that spring from seed long buried in the dust.

I shall read your books with great interest, I am sure, and who knows how God means to prepare you for future usefulness along the path of pain?  “Every branch that beareth fruit He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.”

What an epitaph your boy’s own words would be—­“It is beautiful to be dead”!

To the Same, New York, Nov 30th, 1870.