Evening.—­I have just come up here to my lonely room (which, if I hadn’t the happiest kind of a heart in the world, would look right gloomy) and have read for the third time your dear, good letter, and all I wish is that I could tell you how I love you, and how angry I am with myself that I did not know and love you sooner.  It seems so odd that we should have been born and “raised” so near each other and yet apart.  You say you are a believer in destiny.  So am I—­particularly in affairs of the heart; and I hope that we are made friends now for something more than the satisfaction which we find in loving.  I am in danger of forgetting that I am to stay in this world only a little while and then go home. Will you help me to bear it in mind?...  How must the “Pilgrim’s Progress” interest a mind that has never learned the whole book by rote in childhood.  I have often wished I could read it as a first-told tale, and so I wish about the xiv. of John and some other chapters in the Bible.

Your incidental mention that you have family prayers every evening produced a thousand strange sensations in my mind.  I hardly know why.  Did I ever tell you how I love and admire the new Bishop Johns?  And how if I am a “good Presbyterian,” as they say here, I go to hear him whenever and wherever he preaches.  I don’t think him a great man, but he has that sincerity and truthfulness of manner which win your love at once. [4] ...  What nice times you must have studying German!  I dreamed the night I read your account of it that I was with you, and that you said I was as stupid as an owl.  I have the queerest mind somehow.  It won’t work like those of other people, but goes the farthest way round when it wants to go home, and I never could do anything with it but just let it have its own way, and live the longer.  They are having a nice time down in the parlor worshipping Miss Ford, the light and sunshine of the house, who leaves to-morrow for Natchez, and I am going down to help them.  So, good-night.

To the same.  April 24.

Since I wrote you last we have all had a good deal to put our patience and philosophy and faith to the test, and I must own that I have been for some weeks about as uncomfortable as mortal damsel could be.  Everything went wrong with Mr. Persico, and his gloom extended to all of us.  I never spent such melancholy weeks in my life, and became so homesick that I could hardly drag myself into school.  In the midst of it, however, I made fun for the rest, as I believe I should do in a dungeon; and now it is all over, I look back and laugh still.