n it
twice." If you would know how her presence would soothe an anxiety, or
lift a burden, or cheer a sorrow, or leave a blessing on every room in
the house, ask any of the Talmages. She had tarried at her early home,
taking care of an invalid father, until the bloom of life had
somewhat faded; but she could interest the young folks with some
three or four tender passages in her own history, so that we all knew
that it was not through lack of opportunity that she was not the queen
of one household, instead of being a benediction on a whole circle of
households.

At about seventy years of age she made her last visit to my house, and
when she sat in my Philadelphia church I was more embarrassed at her
presence than by all the audience, because I felt that in religion I
had got no further than the A B C, while she had learned the whole
alphabet, and for many years had finished the Y and Z. When she went
out of this life into the next, what a shout there must have been in
heaven, from the front door clear up to the back seat in the highest
gallery! I saw the other day in the village cemetery of Somerville,
N.J., her resting-place, the tombstone having on it the words which
thirty years ago she told me she would like to have inscribed there,
namely: "The Morning Cometh."

ILLUSTRIOUS SPINSTERS.

Had she a mission in the world? Certainly. As much as Caroline
Herschel, first amanuensis for her illustrious brother, and then his
assistant in astronomical calculations, and then discovering worlds
for herself, dying at ninety-eight years of age, still busy with the
stars till she sped beyond them; as much as had Florence Nightingale,
the nurse of the Crimea; or Grace Darling, the oarswoman of the Long
Stone Lighthouse; or Mary Lyon, the teacher of Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary; or Hannah More, the Christian authoress of England; or
Dorothea Dix, the angel of mercy for the insane; or Anna Etheridge,
among the wounded of Blackburn's Fort; or Margaret Breckenridge, at
Vicksburg; or Mary Shelton, distributing roses and grapes and cologne
in western hospital; or thousands of other glorious women like them,
who never took the marriage sacrament. Appreciate all this, my sister,
and it will make you deliberate before you rush out of the single
state into another, unless you are sure of betterment.

A DIFFICULT BUSINESS.

Deliberate and pray. Pray and deliberate. As I showed you in my former
sermon, a man ought to supplicate Div