To Mrs. Condict, April 16, 1877.

I am glad you liked the picture.  Did you know that you too can get leaves and flowers in advance of spring, by keeping twigs in warm water?  I had forsythia bloom, and other things leafed beautifully.  It is said that apple and pear blossoms will come out in the same way, if placed in the sun in glass cans.  I have been thinking, lately, that if I enjoy my imperfect work, how God, who has made so many beautiful, as well as useful, things, must enjoy His faultless creations.  My work is still to go from house to house where sickness and death are so busy.  Mrs. F. G. has just lost her two only children within a day of each other.  Neither her mother nor sister could go near her during their illness or after their death, because of the flock of little ones in their house, and it was not safe to have a funeral.  Dr. Hastings made a prayer; he said the scene was heart-rending.

May 3d.—­Dr. Storrs preached for us last Sunday, and said one striking thing I must tell you on the passage, “They were stoned, were sawn asunder, they were tempted,” etc.  He said many thought the word tempted out of place amid so many horrors, but that it held its true position, since few things could cause such anguish to a Christian heart as even a suggestion of infidelity to its Lord.  To this a Kempis adds the hell of not knowing whether one had yielded or not.

May 17th.—­“Misery loves company”; and so I am writing to you.  Perhaps it will be some consolation to you that I too have been knocked up for two weeks, one of which I spent in bed.  Nothing serious the matter, only put down and kept down; not agreeable, but necessary.  How astounded we shall be when we wake up in heaven and find our hateful old bodies couldn’t get in!...  M. is making, and H. has made, a picture scrap-book for a hospital in Syria.  Your mother might enjoy that.  We all crave occupation.  “Imprisonment with hard labor” never seems to me so frightful as imprisonment and nothing to do, does.  Did you ever hear the story of the man who spent years in a dark dungeon, idle, and then found some pins in his coat, which he spent years in losing, and crawling about and finding?

Well, I have got rid of a wee morsel of this weary day in writing this, and you will get rid of another morsel in reading it.  So we’ll patch each other up, and limp along together, and by and by go where there it no limping and no patching.

The new serial, her Bible-readings, and painting, with visits to sick-rooms and to the house of mourning, during the early half of this year, left little time for correspondence.  Her letters were few and brief; but they are marked, as was her life, by unusual quietness and depth of feeling.  Her delight was still to speak in them a helpful and cheering word to souls struggling with their own imperfections, or with trials of the way.  A single extract will illustrate the gentle wisdom of her counsels: