as well as divine strength.  But in all her attempts at consolation, side by side with her deep and true sympathy, went the lesson of the harvest of sorrow.  She was always pointing the mourner past the floods, to the high place above them—­teaching him to sing even amid the waves and billows—­“the Lord will command His loving-kindness”; “I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance.”  “I knew,” she wrote to a bereaved friend, “that God would never afflict you so, if He had not something beautiful and blissful to give in place of what He took.”  The insight which her writings revealed into many and subtle aspects of sorrow, made her the recipient of hosts of letters from strangers, opening to her their griefs, and asking her counsel; and to all she gave freely and joyfully as far as her strength and time and judgment would allow.  There was a tonic vein mingling with her comforts.  Her touch was firm as well as tender.  She knew the shoals of morbid sentimentality which skirt the deeps of trouble, and sought to pilot the sorrowing past the shoals to the shore.

And now, having thus spoken of her preparation for God’s work, the work itself, and its fruits, how can we gather up and depict the many personal traits and associations which crowd upon the memory?  Of such things how many are incapable of reproduction, their fine flavor vanishing with the moment.  How often that which most commends them to remembrance lies in the glance of an eye, an inflection of the voice, an expression of the face, which neither pen nor pencil can put on record.

How many such recollections, for example, group themselves round that beautiful home among the hills.  How it bore her mark and was pervaded with her presence, and seemed, more than any other spot, the appropriate setting of her life.  Now she was at her chamber window studying the ever shifting lights and shadows on the hills; now rambling over the fields and through the woods and returning with her hands laden with flowers and grasses; now busy with her ferns in her garden; again beguiling the hours with her pencil, or stealing away to develop some happy fancy or fresh thought on which her mind had been working for days.  And how pleasant her talk.  How she would dart off sometimes from the line of the gravest theme into some quaint, mirth-provoking conceit.  How many odd things she had seen; of how many strange adventures she had partaken, and how graphically and charmingly she told them.  With what relish she would bring forth some good thing saved up to tell to one who would appreciate it; yet, on the other hand, how earnestly, how intelligently, with what simplicity, with what eager delight would she pursue the discussion of the deep things of God.  Nor was her home merely a place of rest and retirement.  Its doors were ever wide open to congenial spirits, and also to some of Christ’s poor, to whom the healing breath of the mountains and the rare sights and sounds of country life were as gifts from heaven.  In that little community she was not content to be a mere summer idler.  There, too, she pursued her ministry of comfort and of instruction.  Eternity alone will reveal the fruitage of the seeds she sowed in her weekly Bible-reading, to which the women came for miles over the mountain roads, through storm and through sunshine.