Many give their best thoughts to provide alleviations--whether in the form of medicines, or dainties for the mind or palate, for the eye or ear; and sweet is the enjoyment of the kindness which provides, whether the luxuries themselves can be relished or not. Some kind soul does a better service still, by affording opportunity for the sufferer to minister to other afflicted ones; to relieve some distress of poverty, or other want. This is sweet; but there are times when the personal trial needs some solace nearer and more direct than this. Then is the hour when the pain of sympathy in the hearts of friends impels them to cast about for relief, and tempts them to speak of hope to the sufferer who has no hope, or none compatible with the kind of consolation they attempt. Going back to the days when I, myself, was the sympathiser, I remember how strong is the temptation to imagine, and to assure the sick one, that his pain will not last; that the time will come when he will be well again; that he is already better; or, if it be impossible to say that, that he will get used to his affliction, and find it more endurable. How was it that I did not see that such offers of consolation must be purely irritating to one who was not feeling better, nor believing that he should ever be better, nor in a state to be cheered by any speculation as to whether his pain would, or would not become more endurable with time! Exactly in proportion to the zeal with which such considerations were pressed, must have been the sufferer’s clearness of perception of the disguised selfishness which dictated the topics and the words. I was (as I half suspected at the time, from my sense of restraint and uneasiness,) trying to console myself, and not my friend; indulging my own cowardice, my own shrinking from a painful truth, at the expense of the feelings of the sufferer for whom my heart was aching. I, who had no genius for consolation, at least in cases of illness, have been silently corrected by the benignest of reproofs,--by the experience of this genius in my own season of infirmity.