thankful we shall be when our turn comes!  The ladies at our little meeting were deeply interested in what I had to tell them about your dear boy, and prayed for you with much feeling.  May our dear Lord bless you abundantly with His sweet presence!  I know He will.  And yet He has willed it that you should suffer.  “Himself hath done it!” Oh how glad He will be when the dispensation of suffering is over, and He can gather His beloved round Him, tearless, free from sorrow and care, and all forever at rest.

May 5th.—­Yesterday, the friend at East Dorset whose three children died within a few weeks of each other, sent me some verses, of which I copy one for you: 

  “The eye of faith beholds
    A golden stair, like that of old, whereon
    Fair spirits go and come;
  God’s angels coming down on errands sweet,
    Our angels going home.”

I hope this golden stair, up which your dear boy climbed “with shout and song,” is covered with God’s angels coming down to bless and comfort you.  One of the most touching passages in the Bible, to my mind, is that which describes angels as coming to minister to Jesus after His temptations in the wilderness.  It gives one such an idea of His helplessness!  Just as I was going out to church this morning, Mr. Prentiss told me of the death of a charming “baby-boy,” one of our lambs, and I could scarcely help bursting into tears, though I had only seen him once.  You can hardly understand how I feel, as a pastor’s wife, toward our people.  Their sorrows come right home.  I have a friend also hanging in agonizing suspense over a little one who has been injured by a fall; she is sweetly submissive, but you know what a mother’s heart is.  I have yet another friend, who has had to give up her baby.  She is a young mother, and far from her family, but says she has “perfect peace.”  So from all sides I hear sorrowful sounds, but so much faith and obedience mingled with the sighs, that I can only wonder at what God can do.

To Miss Morse, May 7, 1872.

How true and how strange it is that our deepest sorrows, spring from our sweetest affections; that as we love much, we suffer much.  What instruments of torture our hearts are!  The passage you quote is all true but people are apt to be impatient in affliction, eager to drink the bitter cup at a draught rather than drop by drop, and fain to dig up the seed as soon as it is planted, to see if it has germinated.  I am fond of quoting that passage about “the peaceable fruit of righteousness” coming “afterward.”

I have just come from the funeral of a little “Wee Davie”; all the crosses around his coffin were tiny ones, and he had a small floral harp in his hand.  I thought as I looked upon his face, still beautiful, though worn, that even babies have to be introduced to the cross, for he had a week of fearful struggle before he was released....  I enclose an extract I made for you from a work on the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  This was all the paper I had at hand at the moment.  The recipe for “curry” I have copied into my recipe-book, and the two lines at the top of the page I addressed to M. A queer mixture of the spiritual and the practical, but no stranger than life’s mixtures always are.