personal traits and associations which crowd upon the memory? Of such
things how many are incapable of reproduction, their fine flavor
vanishing with the moment. How often that which most commends them to
remembrance lies in the glance of an eye, an inflection of the voice, an
expression of the face, which neither pen nor pencil can put on record.

How many such recollections, for example, group themselves round that
beautiful home among the hills. How it bore her mark and was pervaded
with her presence, and seemed, more than any other spot, the appropriate
setting of her life. Now she was at her chamber window studying the ever
shifting lights and shadows on the hills; now rambling over the fields
and through the woods and returning with her hands laden with flowers
and grasses; now busy with her ferns in her garden; again beguiling the
hours with her pencil, or stealing away to develop some happy fancy
or fresh thought on which her mind had been working for days. And how
pleasant her talk. How she would dart off sometimes from the line of the
gravest theme into some quaint, mirth-provoking conceit. How many odd
things she had seen; of how many strange adventures she had partaken,
and how graphically and charmingly she told them. With what relish she
would bring forth some good thing saved up to tell to one who would
appreciate it; yet, on the other hand, how earnestly, how intelligently,
with what simplicity, with what eager delight would she pursue the
discussion of the deep things of God. Nor was her home merely a place of
rest and retirement. Its doors were ever wide open to congenial spirits,
and also to some of Christ's poor, to whom the healing breath of the
mountains and the rare sights and sounds of country life were as gifts
from heaven. In that little community she was not content to be a mere
summer idler. There, too, she pursued her ministry of comfort and of
instruction. Eternity alone will reveal the fruitage of the seeds she
sowed in her weekly Bible-reading, to which the women came for miles
over the mountain roads, through storm and through sunshine.

And here the end came. Death, if a surprise at all to her, could only be
a pleasant surprise. In one of her stories an old family servant says
of her departed mistress: "Often's the time I've heard her talk about
dying, and I mind a time when she thought she was going, and there was
a light in her eye, and it was just as she looked when she said, 'Mary,