was appointed to her to do. At
length it came to her.

'One day, as she was passing the house of her physician, through the
open window she saw and heard that which induced her to go in and offer
her services. A man in a disgusting stage of intoxication had cut his
arm badly, and had come to have it bound up. His little child was with
him, shrieking with terror, her face and clothes covered with dirt. The
doctor roughly and with ill-concealed repugnance was caring for the
wound, while the cook, with no attempt at concealment, was loudly
expressing her disapprobation of the whole proceeding. Laetitia assisted
the doctor, and washed off the blood; then took the child home with her,
bathed her, gave her clean clothes and a dinner, and sent her away with
a new happiness in her heart. While she was doing all this, she found
what she had been seeking. There are very many things in this world
disagreeable in the extreme, which ought to be done with interest, with
care, with _love_. Why should she not undertake to do them? In
themselves they would be repugnant, but _she_ would do them for God, and
she loved her Heavenly Father so well that the hardest thing done for
Him would be the sweetest. In a day or two the feeling settled itself:
it was firmly impressed upon her mind that in these employments she
would have rest.

'One morning, about two years perhaps after the first day of her sorrow,
she dropped into my room with something of her old suddenness, and,
after the customary greetings, said simply: 'I am happy again now.'

''You need not tell me that: I can see it in your face.'

'The pleased expression remained for a moment, and then an intensely
black cloud fell upon her countenance. She said nothing more, and in a
few minutes went away. You see how it was--by one of those freaks by
which the imagination loves to torture us, my remark recalled her whole
misery and its unalterable cause, and having lost for the time the
keynote to her new-found joy, the other took entire possession of her
mind and overwhelmed it. In a few days she came back to me, and I said:
'I pained you when you were here before. I do not know how, but I am
very sorry.'

'You did pain me, but you were entirely innocent. Afterward it grieved
me still more that I _was_ pained--that what you said had the _power_ to
pain me. I will tell you all, if you will hear it;' and, without waiting
for my answer, she gave me the key to the last two years of her li