ends. Letters.

Mrs. Prentiss' letters relating to her husband's call to Chicago require
perhaps an explanatory word. She had some very pleasant associations
with Chicago. It was the home of a brother and sister-in-law, to whom
she was deeply attached, and of other dear relatives. There Stepping
Heavenward had first appeared, and many unknown friends--grateful for
the good it had done them--were eager to form her acquaintance and bid
her welcome to the great city of the Interior. And yet the thought of
removing there filled her with the utmost distress. Had her husband's
call been to some distant post in the field of Foreign Missions, her
language on the subject could hardly have been stronger. But this
language in reality expresses simply the depth of her devotion to her
church and her friends in New York, her morbid shyness and shrinking
from the presence of strangers, and, especially, her vivid sense of
physical inability to make the change without risking the loss of what
health and power of sleep still remained to her. Misgiving on this last
point caused her husband to hesitate long before accepting the call,
and to feel in after years that his decision to accept it, although
conscientiously made, had been a grave mistake.

_To Mrs. Condict, New York, June 3, 1871._

I knew that you would rather hear from me than through the papers, the
fact that Mr. Prentiss has been once more unanimously elected by the
General Assembly to the Chicago Professorship. He has come home greatly
perplexed as to his duty, and prepared to do it, at any reasonable cost,
if he can only find out what it is. We built our Dorset house not as a
mere luxury, but with the hope that the easy summer there would so build
up our health as to increase and prolong our usefulness; but going to
Chicago would deprive us of that, besides cutting us off from all our
friends. But we want to know no will but God's in this question, and I
am sure you and Miss K. will join us in the prayer that we may not so
much as _suggest_ to Him what path He will lead us into. The experience
of the past winter would impress upon me the fact that _place and
position_ have next to nothing to do with happiness; that we can be
wretched in a palace, radiant in a dungeon. Mr. P. said yesterday that
it broke his heart to hear me talk of giving up Dorset; but perhaps this
heartbreaking is exactly what we need to remind us of what for many
years we never had a chance to forget,