en I got back. He reads them awfully, and
will puzzle over a word long enough for me to have leisure to go crazy
and recover my sanity. However, nobody shall make fun of him save
myself; so look out. The boys have gone skating to-day for the third
time this winter, there has been so little cold weather.

_Sunday Evening._--I did not mean to plague you with Stepping Heavenward
any more, but we have had a scene to-day which will amuse you and Mrs.
Smith. Just before service began, an aristocratic-looking lady seated in
front of Mrs. B. began to talk to her, whereupon Mrs. B. turned round
and announced to the congregation that I was the subject of it by
pointing me out, and then getting up and bringing her to our pew. Once
there, she seized me by the hand and said, "I am Mrs. ----. I have
just read your book and been carried away with it. I knew your husband
thirty-three years ago, and have come here to see you both," etc., etc.
Finding she could get nothing out of me, she fell upon M., and asked her
if I was her sister, which M. declared I was not. After church I invited
her to step into the parsonage, and she stepped in for an hour and told
this story: She had had the book lent her, and yesterday, lunching at
Mrs. A.'s, asked her if she had read it, and finding she had not, made
her promise to get it. She then asked who this E. Prentiss was, and a
lady present enlightened her. "What! my sister's beloved Miss Payson,
and married to George Prentiss, my old friend!! I'll go there to church
to-morrow and see for myself." So it turns out that she was a Miss ----,
of Mississippi; that your father gallanted her to Louisville, when she
was going there to be married at sixteen years of age; that she was
living in Richmond at the time I was teaching there, her sister boarding
in the house with me. Such talking, such life and enthusiasm you never
saw in a woman of forty-eight! "Well," she winds up at last, "I've found
two _treasures_, and you needn't think I'm going to let you go. I'll go
home and tell Mr. ---- all about it." Papa and I have called each other
"two treasures" ever since she went away. The whole scene worked him up
and did him good, for he always loves to have his Southern friends drum
him up and talk to him of your Uncle Seargent and Aunt Anna. Mr. ---- is
one of our millionaires, and she married him a year ago after thirteen
years of widowhood. She says she still has 200 "negroes," who won't
go away and won't work,