I have had letters from home within a few days. And mother wrote--“You will feel quite lost when you come. We’ve moved into a large and beautiful tenement on B. street, close by the Haydens, and fitted the front parlor all up new, taking the old parlor furniture for the sitting-room. I hope you’ll like these changes better than poor Kit does. Your father brought her over here in a basket, covered, that she might not see the way and be running back. But we missed her, and your father went over to see if he could find her at the old rooms, and there the poor creature was, prowling about the open cellar window, as lean and hungry-looking as a wolf. Your father worries half of his time about her, when he is in the house. I really think he wishes he had stayed there too. Now that it is becoming an old thing, I see that he is often tired of so much to do. He gets the best of business, I mean business that pays the best; but his responsibilities wear him, and he has trouble with some of his clients. When he has been working day and night for them, they are as likely as any way to think that he hasn’t done enough. “I have my troubles, too. I ought to be ashamed to complain, I suppose, now we are doing so well, but when you come you will see, as I do, that there are vexations for those who have enough of every thing, as well as for the poor. Perhaps you will think, as your father and I are sometimes inclined to, that it isn’t worth while to look for much real, lasting happiness in this world, or for any benefit that hasn’t its tax.” Yes, one sees how it is with my poor parents; poor in their adversity, poor now in their prosperity. They look to the _outward_ conditions of their lot for a great good that shall be final; for a life serene and well-satisfied that shall make its way into them, from without; from the new friends, the fast-filling purse, the freshly adorned home. Would that they and all the world could know that every good, every real enjoyment of life, is born of God _in the soul_. There Love, the Divine Life, the Artist-Life, the Blessed Life, whatever we call it, has its genial, its beloved home. Ah, Heaven! to have this love within us, so that we must burst forth into singing; to have it beaming thence upon our friends, our home, upon the earth, crowning them all with glory and light!--this is to know how good God is, in that He made and endowed us specially for this kind of life. Only we have sought out many inventions; have picked up one thing and another on our right hand and on our left, calling the laborious, unseemly patch-work we have in this way made up, Life. That we _must_ pay a tax grievous to be borne on this, is one of the merciful dispensations, for it brings us to look for that to come, which will come without price, which will surely come, if we will accept nothing else, if we will wait for it, and receive it like little children.