There was, at New York, a poor adventurer, half patriot, half author, a miserable man, always in such depths of distress, with such squadrons of enemies, that no charity could relieve, and no intervention save him.  He believed Europe banded for his destruction, and America corrupted to connive at it.  Margaret listened to these woes with such patience and mercy, that she drew five hundred dollars, which had been invested for her in a safe place, and put them in those hapless hands, where, of course, the money was only the prey of new rapacity, to be bewailed by new reproaches.  When one of her friends had occasion to allude to this, long afterwards, she replied:—­

’In answer to what you say of ——­, I wish, indeed, the little effort I made for him had been wiselier applied.  Yet these are not the things one regrets.  It will not do to calculate too closely with the affectionate human impulse.  We must consent to make many mistakes, or we should move too slow to help our brothers much.  I am sure you do not regret what you spent on Miani, and other worthless people.  As things looked then, it would have been wrong not to have risked the loss.’

TRUTH.

But Margaret crowned all her talents and virtues with a love of truth, and the power to speak it.  In great and in small matters, she was a woman of her word, and gave those who conversed with her the unspeakable comfort that flows from plain dealing.  Her nature was frank and transparent, and she had a right to say, as she says in her journal:—­

    ’I have the satisfaction of knowing, that, in my counsels, I
    have given myself no air of being better than I am.’

And again:—­

’In the chamber of death, I prayed in very early years, “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.”  O, the granting of this prayer is sometimes terrible to me!  I walk over the burning ploughshares, and they sear my feet.  Yet nothing but truth will do; no love will serve that is not eternal, and as large as the universe; no philanthropy in executing whose behests I myself become unhealthy; no creative genius which bursts asunder my life, to leave it a poor black chrysalid behind.  And yet this last is too true of me.’

She describes a visit made in May, 1844, at the house of some valued friends in West Roxbury, and adds:  ’We had a long and deep conversation, happy in its candor.  Truth, truth, thou art the great preservative!  Let free air into the mind, and the pestilence cannot lurk in any corner.’

And she uses the following language in an earnest letter to another friend:—­

    ’My own entire sincerity, in every passage of life, gives me a
    right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or
    attentions.’

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