though these may be with the spirit of truest adoration. Ours was the purest hero-worship, unmixed with aught of personal vanity or ambition. We simply thanked God, in the fulness of our hearts, that He had sent Beethoven to enrich and beautify the world! At other times Aunt Mim would sit quietly at work in the library, whilst I wandered restlessly to and fro, like a caged lion, as she always said, telling her all that passed through my brain. It was just her unruffled calm that encouraged me to let loose on her the flood-gates of my soul. Surely those human beings come nearest perfection, who have preserved through life their angelic innocence, and it is perhaps to further this that such are often afflicted with some bodily infirmity, whereby the soul has power to raise itself above this earth. By her perfect submission to the Divine Will, her firm faith which no doubt had ever clouded, no less than by her unswerving fidelity in friendship, and the cheerful, sunny temperament that had in it something of the playfulness and simplicity of a child, Aunt Mim was the pearl of her whole family and became invaluable and indispensable to ours. In those hours of greatest suffering, when words of good cheer could no more avail, then her quiet sympathy would yet often find means of making life a little more endurable to the poor sick child, of distracting my father’s thoughts from present sadness. Only one so utterly detached from all thought of self could have refreshed and lightened that atmosphere of gloom. So heavily did it press at times on my childish mind, and so thoroughly had my mother inculcated the belief in death as the supreme good to be wished and desired by us all, as the sole release from pain and suffering for ourselves and others, that during the weeks in which, after my brother Otto’s birth, she lay between life and death, my governess often heard me praying that God would take her to Himself! It caused some perplexity, I believe, to her who overheard this singular prayer, to hit on the right method of bringing me to desist from it, without disturbing the effect of the maternal teaching, and she wisely contented herself with telling me that although it would doubtless be for Mamma’s happiness to go to heaven, I need not ask for this, as God would take her to Himself in His own good time, and that moreover I should then see her no more. I was very much astonished at this, never having for a moment contemplated the possibility of being deprived of my mother’s presence by death. My idea of heaven was of something so real and near, that whenever I gazed up into the blue sky, I felt sure that were my beloved ones there, I might at any moment see a little window opening to let me through to join them! Well is it with us if we can keep this belief through life, if like children, who have left their heavenly home too recently to accustom themselves to this earth, and could depart again from it without a pang, we can but bear in mind