sudden death. I had already written him and sent him a note.
I cut from the Evening Post the slip I enclose about Mr. Moody's
question-drawer. I wish I could hope for as sudden a death as Mrs. P.'s.

_To Mrs. Condict, April 16, 1877._

I am glad you liked the picture. Did you know that you too can get
leaves and flowers in advance of spring, by keeping twigs in warm water?
I had forsythia bloom, and other things leafed beautifully. It is said
that apple and pear blossoms will come out in the same way, if placed in
the sun in glass cans. I have been thinking, lately, that if I enjoy
my imperfect work, how God, who has made so many beautiful, as well as
useful, things, must enjoy His faultless creations. My work is still to
go from house to house where sickness and death are so busy. Mrs. F. G.
has just lost her two only children within a day of each other. Neither
her mother nor sister could go near her during their illness or after
their death, because of the flock of little ones in their house, and it
was not safe to have a funeral. Dr. Hastings made a prayer; he said the
scene was heart-rending.

_May 3d._--Dr. Storrs preached for us last Sunday, and said one striking
thing I must tell you on the passage, "They were stoned, were sawn
asunder, they were tempted," etc. He said many thought the word
_tempted_ out of place amid so many horrors, but that it held its true
position, since few things could cause such anguish to a Christian heart
as even a suggestion of infidelity to its Lord. To this a Kempis adds
the _hell_ of not knowing whether one had yielded or not.

_May 17th._--"Misery loves company"; and so I am writing to you. Perhaps
it will be some consolation to you that I too have been knocked up for
two weeks, one of which I spent in bed. Nothing serious the matter, only
put down and kept down; not agreeable, but necessary. How _astounded_
we shall be when we wake up in heaven and find our hateful old bodies
couldn't get in!... M. is making, and H. has made, a picture scrap-book
for a hospital in Syria. Your mother might enjoy that. We all _crave_
occupation. "Imprisonment with hard labor" never seems to me so
frightful as imprisonment and nothing to do, does. Did you ever hear the
story of the man who spent years in a dark dungeon, idle, and then found
some pins in his coat, which he spent years in losing, and crawling
about and finding?

Well, I have got rid of a wee morsel of this weary day in writing th