“I will tell you, Euthymia, if you will promise not to find fault with me for carrying out my plan as I have made up my mind to do.  You may read this letter before I seal it, and if you find anything in it you don’t like you can suggest any change that you think will improve it.  I hope you will see that it explains itself.  I don’t believe that you will find anything to frighten you in it.”

This is the letter, as submitted to Miss Tower by her friend.  The bold handwriting made it look like a man’s letter, and gave it consequently a less dangerous expression than that which belongs to the tinted and often fragrant sheet with its delicate thready characters, which slant across the page like an April shower with a south wind chasing it.

Arrowhead village, August—­, 18—.

My dear sir,—­You will doubtless be surprised at the sight of a letter like this from one whom you only know as the Secretary of the Pansophian Society.  There is a very common feeling that it is unbecoming in one of my sex to address one of your own with whom she is unacquainted, unless she has some special claim upon his attention.  I am by no means disposed to concede to the vulgar prejudice on this point.  If one human being has anything to communicate to another,—­anything which deserves being communicated,—­I see no occasion for bringing in the question of sex.  I do not think the homo sum of Terence can be claimed for the male sex as its private property on general any more than on grammatical grounds,

I have sometimes thought of devoting myself to the noble art of healing.  If I did so, it would be with the fixed purpose of giving my whole powers to the service of humanity.  And if I should carry out that idea, should I refuse my care and skill to a suffering fellow-mortal because that mortal happened to be a brother, and not a sister?  My whole nature protests against such one-sided humanity!  No!  I am blind to all distinctions when my eyes are opened to any form of suffering, to any spectacle of want.

You may ask me why I address you, whom I know little or nothing of, and to whom such an advance may seem presumptuous and intrusive.  It is because I was deeply impressed by the paper which I attributed to you,—­that on Ocean, River, and Lake, which was read at one of our meetings.  I say that I was deeply impressed, but I do not mean this as a compliment to that paper.  I am not bandying compliments now, but thinking of better things than praises or phrases.  I was interested in the paper, partly because I recognized some of the feelings expressed in it as my own,—­partly because there was an undertone of sadness in all the voices of nature as you echoed them which made me sad to hear, and which I could not help longing to cheer and enliven.  I said to myself, I should like to hold communion with the writer of that paper.  I have had my lonely hours and days, as he has had.  I have had some of his experiences in my intercourse with nature.  And oh! if I could draw him into those better human relations which await us all, if we come with the right dispositions, I should blush if I stopped to inquire whether I violated any conventional rule or not.