Thither she consented to go for a visit of a
few weeks, and there she remained, as an honored guest tenderly cared
for, for eighteen months. "To the end of her days," says her
biographer, "this period of eighteen months stood out in her memory as
the jubilee of her life, the sunniest, the most restful, and the
tenderest to her affections of her whole earthly experience." She
wrote a Boston friend, "You must imagine me surrounded by every
comfort, sustained by every tenderness that can cheer, blest in the
continual kindness of the family in which Providence has placed me,--I
with no claim but those of a common nature." And again, "So completely
am I adopted into the circle of loving spirits that I sometimes
forget I really am not to consider the bonds transient in their
binding."

She very much needed these friends and their tender care. Nine months
after her arrival, we hear of occasional hemorrhages from which she
has been exempt for ten days, the pain in her side less acute, and her
physician has given her permission to walk about her room. One would
think that her career was practically ended, but, strange to say, the
career which was to make her famous had not yet begun. From this date,
her convalescence proceeded steadily, and she was able to enjoy much
in the delightful home and refined social circle in which she found
herself. "Your remark," she writes a friend, "that I probably enjoy
more now in social intercourse than I have ever before done is quite
true. Certainly if I do not improve, it will be through wilful
self-neglect." Apparently, she was having a glimpse of a less prosaic
existence than the grinding routine of a boarding school. Madam Dix
died at the age of ninety-one, leaving her granddaughter, still in
Europe, a substantial legacy, which sensibly increased her limited
resources and, when the time came for action, left her free to carry
out her great schemes of benevolence without hampering personal
anxieties. It ought to preserve the memory of Madam Dix that she
endowed a great philanthropist.

In the autumn of 1837, Miss Dix returned to America, and avoiding the
New England climate, spent the winter in Washington, D. C., and its
neighborhood. Apparently, it was not a wholly happy winter, chiefly
because of her vain and tender longings for the paradise she had left
across the sea. The Washington of 1837 seemed raw to her after the
cultivated English home she had discovered. "I was not conscious," s