This faculty was always a strong one.  She was catechized in church with the village children when only four years old, and when six, could repeat many poems from an old collection called “The Diadem,” such as Mrs. Hemans’ “Cross in the Wilderness,” and Dale’s “Christian Virgin to her Apostate Lover”; but she reminded me one day during her illness of how little she understood what she was saying in the days when she fluently recited such lines to her nursery audience!

She liked to repeat the alternate verses of the Psalms, when the others were read to her; and to the good things laid up in her mind she owed much of the consolation that strengthened her in hours of trial.  After one night of great suffering, in which she had been repeating George Herbert’s poem, “The Pulley,” she said that the last verse had helped her to realize what the hidden good might be which underlaid her pain—­

Let him be rich and weary; that, at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast.

During the earlier part of her illness, when every one expected that she would recover, she found it difficult to submit to the unaccountable sufferings which her highly-strung temperament felt so keenly; but after this special night of physical and mental darkness, it seemed as if light had broken upon her through the clouds, for she said she had, as it were, looked her pain and weariness in the face, and seen they were sent for some purpose—­and now that she had done so, we should find that she would be “more patient than before.”  We were told to take a sheet of paper, and write out a calendar for a week with the text above, “In patience possess ye your souls.”  Then as each day went by we were to strike it through with a pencil; this we did, hoping that the passing days were leading her nearer to recovery, and not knowing that each was in reality “a day’s march nearer home.”

For the text of another week she had “Be strong and of a good courage,” as the words had been said by a kind friend to cheer her just before undergoing the trial of an operation.  Later still, when nights of suffering were added to days of pain, she chose—­“The day is Thine, the night also is Thine.”

Of what may be termed external spiritual privileges she did not have many, but she derived much comfort from an unexpected visitor.  During nine years previously she had known the Rev. Edward Thring as a correspondent, but they had not met face to face, though they had tried on several occasions to do so.  Now, when their chances of meeting were nearly gone, he came and gave great consolation by his unravelling of the mystery of suffering, and its sanctifying power; as also by his interpretation that the life which we are meant to lead under the dispensation of the Spirit who has been given for our guidance into Truth, is one which does not take us out of the world, but keeps us from its evil, enabling us to lead a heavenly existence on earth, and so to span over the chasm which divides us from heaven.