he _could not_ alter
the thing that had gone forth from her lips. Our belief in the
certainty of her fulfilling her word was like our belief in the
immutability of the laws of nature. Whoever asked her got of her the
absolute truth on every subject, and, when she had no good thing to say,
her silence was often truly awful. When anything mean or ungenerous was
brought to her knowledge, she would close her lips resolutely; but the
flash in her eyes showed what she would speak were speech permitted. In
her last days she spoke to a friend of what she had suffered from the
strength of her personal antipathies. 'I thank God,' she said, 'that I
believe at last I have overcome all that too, and that there has not
been, for some years, any human being toward whom I have felt a movement
of dislike.'

"The last year of her life was a constant discipline of unceasing pain,
borne with that fortitude which could make her an entertaining and
interesting companion even while the sweat of mortal agony was starting
from her brow. Her own room she kept as a last asylum, to which she
would silently retreat when the torture became too intense for the
repression of society, and there alone, with closed doors, she wrestled
with her agony. The stubborn independence of her nature took refuge in
this final fastness; and she prayed only that she might go down to death
with the full ability to steady herself all the way, needing the help of
no other hand.

"The ultimate struggle of earthly feeling came when this proud
self-reliance was forced to give way, and she was obliged to leave
herself helpless in the hands of others. 'God requires that I should
give up my last form of self-will,' she said; 'now I have resigned
_this_, perhaps he will let me go home.'

"In a good old age, Death, the friend, came and opened the door of this
mortal state, and a great soul, that had served a long apprenticeship to
little things, went forth into the joy of its Lord; a life of
self-sacrifice and self-abnegation passed into a life of endless rest."

"But," said Rudolph, "I rebel at this life of self-abnegation and
self-sacrifice. I do not think it the duty of noble women, who have
beautiful natures and enlarged and cultivated tastes, to make themselves
the slaves of the sick-room and nursery."

"Such was not the teaching of our New England faith," said I. "Absolute
unselfishness,--the death of self,--such were its teachings, and such as
Esther's the characte