d to the
constant inroads of little pattering feet; and all the various
sicknesses and ailments of delicate childhood made absorbing drafts upon
her time.

"After a while she left New England with the brother to whose family she
devoted herself. The failing health of the wife and mother left more and
more the charge of all things in her hands; servants were poor, and all
the appliances of living had the rawness and inconvenience which in
those days attended Western life. It became her fate to supply all other
people's defects and deficiencies. Wherever a hand failed, there must
her hand be. Whenever a foot faltered, she must step into the ranks. She
was the one who thought for and cared for and toiled for all, yet made
never a claim that any one should care for her.

"It was not till late in my life that I became acquainted with the deep
interior sacrifice, the constant self-abnegation, which all her life
involved. She was born with a strong, vehement, impulsive nature,--a
nature both proud and sensitive,--a nature whose tastes were passions,
whose likings and whose aversions were of the most intense and positive
character. Devoted as she always seemed to the mere practical and
material, she had naturally a deep romance and enthusiasm of temperament
which exceeded all that can be written in novels. It was chiefly owing
to this that a home and a central affection of her own were never hers.
In her early days of attractiveness, none who would have sought her
could meet the high requirements of her ideality; she never saw her
hero,--and so never married. Family cares, the tending of young
children, she often confessed, were peculiarly irksome to her. She had
the head of a student, a passionate love for the world of books. A
Protestant convent, where she might devote herself without interruption
to study, was her ideal of happiness. She had, too, the keenest
appreciation of poetry, of music, of painting, and of natural scenery.
Her enjoyment in any of these things was intensely vivid whenever, by
chance, a stray sunbeam of the kind darted across the dusty path of her
life; yet in all these her life was a constant repression. The eagerness
with which she would listen to any account from those more fortunate
ones who had known these things, showed how ardent a passion was
constantly held in check. A short time before her death, talking with a
friend who had visited Switzerland, she said, with great feeling: 'All
my life my