It took you a good while to answer my last letter, and I have been equally lazy about writing since yours strayed this way.  Letter-writing has always been a resource and a pastime to me; a refuge in head-achy and rainy days, and a tiny way to give pleasure or do good, when other paths were hedged up.  But this summer I have left almost everybody in the lurch, partly from being more or less unwell and out of spirits, partly because the Chicago question, remaining unsettled, has been such a damper that I hadn’t much heart to speak either of it or of anything else.  We are perplexed beyond measure what to do; the thought of losing my minister and having him turn into a professor, agonizes me; on the other hand, who knows but he needs the rest that change of labor and the five months’ vacation would give him? His chief worry is the effect the attending funerals all the time has already had on my health.  One day I part with and bury (in imagination!) now this friend, now that, and this mournful work does not sharpen one’s appetite or invigorate one’s frame.  I don’t know how we’ve stood the conflict; and it seems rather selfish to allude to my part of it; but women live more in their friendships than men do, and the thought of tearing up all our roots is more painful to me than to my husband, and he will not lose what I must lose in addition, and as I have said before, my minister, which is the hardest part of it.

I want you to know what straits we are in, in the hope that you and yours will be stirred up to pray that we may make no mistake, but go or stay as the Lord would have us.  We have found our little home a nice refuge for us in the storm; Mr. P. says he should have gone distracted in a boarding-house.  I do not envy you the Conway crowd.  But I fancy it is a good region for collecting mosses and like treasures.  I think the prettiest thing in our house is a flattish bracket, fastened to the wall and filled with flowers; it looks like a graceful, meandering letter S and is one of the idols I bow down to....  I have “Holiness through Faith”; the first time I read it at Mr. R——­’s request, I said I believed every word of it, but this summer, reading it in a different mood, it puzzles me.  The idea is plausible; if God tells us to be holy, as He certainly does, is it not for Him to provide the way for our being so, and is it likely He needs our whole lives before He can accomplish His own design?  I talked with Mr. Prentiss about it, and at first he rejected the thought of holiness through faith, but last night we got upon the subject again and he was interested in some sentences I read to him and said he must examine the book.  When are you coming to spend that week in Dorset?  Love to each and all.

To a young Friend, Kauinfels, Sept. 9, 1871.