hopes may be strengthened; and I trust that
you will find in your own happy experience that "joy and peace" go hand
in hand with love--so that in proportion to your devotion to the Saviour
will be the blessedness of your life. When I begin I hardly know where
to stop, and now I find myself almost at the end of my sheet before I
have begun to say what I wish. This will only assure you that I love you
a thousand times better than I did when I did not know that your heart
was filled with hopes and affections like my own, and that I earnestly
desire, if Providence permits us to enjoy intercourse in this or in any
other way, we may never lose sight of the one great truth that we are
_not our own._ I pray you sometimes remember me at the throne of grace.
The more I see of the Saviour, the more I feel my own weakness and
helplessness and my need of His constant presence, and I can not help
asking assistance from all those who love Him.... Oh, how sorry I am
that I have come to the end! I wish I had any faculty for expressing
affection, so that I might tell you how much I love and how often I
think of you.

Her cousin having gone abroad, a break in the correspondence with him
occurred about this time and continued for several months. In a letter
to her friend, Miss Thurston, dated April 21st, she thus refers to her
school:

There are six of us teachers, five of them born in Maine--which is
rather funny, as that is considered by most of the folks here as the
place where the world comes to an end. Although the South lifts up its
wings and crows over the North, it is glad enough to get its teachers
there, and ministers too, and treats them very well when it gets
them, into the bargain. We have in the school about one hundred and
twenty-five pupils of all ages. I never knew till I came here the
influence which early religious education exerts upon the whole future
age. There is such a wonderful difference between most of these young
people and those in the North, that you might almost believe them
another race of beings. Mrs. Persico is beautiful, intelligent,
interesting, and pious. Mr. Persico is just as much like John Neal as
difference of education and of circumstances can permit. Mr. N.'s strong
sense of justice, his enthusiasm, his fun and wit, his independence and
self-esteem, his tastes, too, as far as I know them, all exist in like
degree in Mr. Persico.

The early spring, with its profusion of flowers of every hue, so