My joy was turned to sadness.  I ran to my good doctor.  He chased my bitter tears away, and soothed me with unbounded praises and visions of future success.  He was then confined to the house with his last illness.  He asked me that day if I would like to have, when he was gone, the old lexicon, Testament, and grammar that we had so often thumbed together.  “Yes, but I would rather have you stay,” I replied, “for what can I do when you are gone?” “Oh,” said he tenderly, “I shall not be gone; my spirit will still be with you, watching you in all life’s struggles.”  Noble, generous friend!  He had but little on earth to bequeath to anyone, but when the last scene in his life was ended, and his will was opened, sure enough there was a clause saying:  “My Greek lexicon, Testament, and grammar, and four volumes of Scott’s commentaries, I will to Elizabeth Cady.”  I never look at these books without a feeling of thankfulness that in childhood I was blessed with such a friend and teacher.

I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion, the church, the parsonage, the graveyard, and the solemn, tolling bell.  Everything connected with death was then rendered inexpressibly dolorous.  The body, covered with a black pall, was borne on the shoulders of men; the mourners were in crape and walked with bowed heads, while the neighbors who had tears to shed, did so copiously and summoned up their saddest facial expressions.  At the grave came the sober warnings to the living and sometimes frightful prophesies as to the state of the dead.  All this pageantry of woe and visions of the unknown land beyond the tomb, often haunted my midnight dreams and shadowed the sunshine of my days.  The parsonage, with its bare walls and floors, its shriveled mistress and her blind sister, more like ghostly shadows than human flesh and blood; the two black servants, racked with rheumatism and odoriferous with a pungent oil they used in the vain hope of making their weary limbs more supple; the aged parson buried in his library in the midst of musty books and papers—­all this only added to the gloom of my surroundings.  The church, which was bare, with no furnace to warm us, no organ to gladden our hearts, no choir to lead our songs of praise in harmony, was sadly lacking in all attractions for the youthful mind.  The preacher, shut up in an octagonal box high above our heads, gave us sermons over an hour long, and the chorister, in a similar box below him, intoned line after line of David’s Psalms, while, like a flock of sheep at the heels of their shepherd, the congregation, without regard to time or tune, straggled after their leader.