and by a book of devotions entitled, "Evening
Hours." Lengthening the day at both ends, "rising before the sun and
going to bed after midnight," working while others slept, gave time
for these extra tasks. Nature exacted her usual penalties. In the
third year of this arduous labor, threatenings of lung troubles
appeared which, however, she defied even when "in conducting her
classes she had to stand with one hand on a desk for support, and the
other pressed hard to her side as though to repress a hard pain."
Meanwhile she wrote a bosom friend: "There is in our nature a
disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which
unless hourly combated will overcome the best faculties of our minds
and paralyse our most useful powers.... I have often entertained a
dread lest I should fall a victim to my besieger, and that fear has
saved me thus far."

Besides the terror of lapsing into self-indulgence, she was
stimulated to activity by the care of her brothers, for one of whom
she seems to have felt special anxiety: "Oh, Annie," she writes, "if
that child is good, I care not how humble his pathway in life. It is
for him my soul is filled with bitterness when sickness wastes me; it
is because of him I dread to die." Was there no one to advise her that
the best care of her brother would be to care for herself, and that if
she would do more, she must first do less! Where was Dr. Channing who,
more than any other, was responsible for her intemperate zeal! It
appears that Dr. Channing, "not without solicitude," as he writes her,
was watching over his eager disciple. "Your infirm health," he says,
"seems to darken your prospect of usefulness. But I believe your
constitution will yet be built up, if you will give it a fair chance.
You must learn to give up your plans of usefulness as much as those of
gratification, to the will of God."

Miss Dix abandoned her school apparently in 1827, after six years of
service and at the age of twenty-five. The following spring and summer
she spent as a governess in the family of Dr. Channing at his summer
home in Rhode Island. Her duties were light and she lived much in the
open air, devoting her leisure to botany in which she was already "no
mean proficient," and to "the marine life of the beautiful region."
Very pretty letters were exchanged between her and Dr. Channing at the
termination of the engagement. "We will hear no more of thanks," he
wrote her, "but your affection for