concern that Miss Lyman's health is so much worse,
that she is about to leave Vassar. Is this true? I can not say I should
be very sorry if I should hear she was going to be called up higher. It
seems such a blessed thing to finish up one's work when the Master
says we may, and going to be with Him. I can fully sympathise with the
feeling that made Mrs. Graham say, as she closed her daughter's eyes, "I
wish you joy, my darling!" But I should want to see her before she went;
that would be next best to seeing her after she got back. If you meet
with a dear little book called "The Melody of the 23d Psalm," do read
it; it is by Miss Anna Warner, and shows great knowledge of, and love
for, the Bible. In a few weeks I shall be able to send you a copy of
Stepping Heavenward.

We have been home rather more than a week and the house is all upside
down, outwardly and inwardly. For A. sails for Europe on the 21st with
M. and Hal Smith, to be gone a year, and this involves sending the other
children to school, and various trying changes of the sort. Tossing my
long sheltered lambs into the world has cost me inexpressible pain; only
a mother can understand how much and why; and they, on their part, go
into it shrinking and quivering in every nerve. To their father, as well
as to me, this has been a time of sore trial, and we are doing our best
to keep each other up amid the discouragements and temptations that
confront us. For each new phase of life brings more or less of both.

_Stepping Heavenward_ was published toward the end of October, having
appeared already as a serial in the Chicago Advance. The first number of
the serial was printed February 4, 1869. The work was planned and the
larger part of it composed during the winter and spring of 1867-8.
Referring more especially to this part of it, she once said to a friend:
"Every word of that book was a prayer, and seemed to come of itself.
I never knew how it was written, for my heart and hands were full of
something else." By "something else" she had in mind the care of little
Francis. The ensuing summer the manuscript was taken with her to Dorset,
carefully revised and finished before her return to the city. In
revising it she had the advantage of suggestions made by her friends,
Miss Warner and Miss Lyman, both of them Christian ladies of the best
culture and of rare good sense.

Notwithstanding the favor with which the work had been received as
issued in The Advance, Mrs.