her books grew, like a plant, from within outwards; they were born in the nursery of the schoolroom, and nurtured by the suggestions of the children’s interest, thus blooming in the garden of a true and natural education.  The last book she wrote, “Ten Boys Who Lived on the Road from Long Ago to Now,” she had had in her mind for years.  This little book she dedicated to a son of her sister Margaret.  I am sure she gave me an outline of the plan fully ten years before she wrote it out.  The subject of her mental work lay in her mind, growing, gathering to itself nourishment, and organizing itself consciously or unconsciously by all the forces of her unresting brain and all the channels of her study, until it sprung from her pen complete at a stroke.  She wrote good English, of course, and would never sentimentalize, but went directly at the pith of the matter; and, if she had few thoughts on a subject, she made but few words.  I don’t think she did much by way of revising or recasting after her thought was once committed to paper.  I think she wrote it as she would have said it, always with an imaginary child before her, to whose intelligence and sympathy it was addressed.  Her habit of mind was to complete a thought before any attempt to convey it to others.  This made her a very helpful and clear teacher and leader.  She seemed always to have considered carefully anything she talked about, and gave her opinion with a deliberation and clear conviction which affected others as a verdict, and made her an oracle to a great many kinds of people.  All her plans were thoroughly shaped before execution; all her work was true, finished, and conscientious in every department.  She did a great deal of quiet, systematic thinking from her early school days onward, and was never satisfied until she completed the act of thought by expression and manifestation in some way for the advantage of others.  The last time I saw her, which was for less than five minutes accorded me by her nurse during her last illness, she spoke of a new plan of literary work which she had in mind, and although she attempted no delineation of it, said she was thinking it out whenever she felt that it was safe for her to think.  Her active brain never ceased its plans for others, for working toward the illumination of the mind, the purification of the soul, and the elevation and broadening of all the ideals of life.  I remember her sitting, absorbed in reflection, at the setting of the sun every evening while we were at the House Beautiful of the Peabodys [We spent nearly all our time at West Newton in a little cottage on the hill, where Miss Elizabeth Peabody, with her saintly mother and father, made a paradise of love and refinement and ideal culture for us, and where we often met the Hawthornes and Manns; and we shall never be able to measure the wealth of intangible mental and spiritual influence which we received therefrom.] at West Newton; or, when at home, gazing every night, before retiring, from her own house-top, standing at her watchtower to commune with the starry heavens, and receive that exaltation of spirit which is communicated when we yield ourselves to the “essentially religious.” (I use this phrase, because it delighted her so when I repeated it to her as the saying of a child in looking at the stars.)