here is what may be called a reversion to
type in spirit, like this: that a person may be absolutely dominated
for years by certain influences and not only feel no antagonism to
them, but actually yield with devotion and inconceivable sacrifices,
yet, when the influence is removed and there is no longer the
love-cause for faithfulness the illusion not only passes, but the
person finds himself of his original mind and spirit, emancipated, gone
back to himself, what he really was in the beginning before the
domination began. Such at least is as near what happened in my own
case as I can tell it.

I remained in the little house between the hills, walking about,
attending to my few wants, receiving an occasional visitor in a sort of
trance of sorrow. William had always meant more to me than Heaven. I
had endured poverty, prayers, persecutions and revivals for his sake.
And now I had lost him. The very thought was immeasurable. I wore it
for mourning. I missed him when I looked down the bridle path into the
valley, and I missed him when I looked at the stars. Nothing meant
anything to me without him. Then suddenly the veil lifted. I seemed
at last to have conceded him to what is beyond the grave. At once my
own mind came back to me, not the humble, church-censored mind I had
during his life, but my very own, and it was like another conversion.
I remembered scenes and thoughts and faces that I had not recalled
since girlhood. The innocent gayety of my youth came back to me, and I
recalled distinctly with what naive, happy worldliness I faced the
world then, and not the Kingdom of Heaven that I have been staring at
since through William's eyes for thirty years.

The next Sunday I went to church as usual, but I did not go up near the
front, which had always been my custom. It occurred to me that now I
did not have to sit in the saint neighborhood, but might sit back with
the honester human beings. The preacher was a young man of the
progressive new order, who sustained the same relation as pastor to the
church that an ambitious foreman sustains to a business that must be
renovated and improved. He was taking up his foreign missionary
collection very much after the manner of an auctioneer:

"Five dollars, five dollars, five dollars: who gives five dollars that
the Gospel may be spread in China and Siam? Who gives five dollars
that there may be light in India and to save women from casting their
innocent babes i