It is only within a week or two that I have come to Boston, or been out to church at all. I have enjoyed, almost to pain, the few services I have attended, for I am not sure that I hold myself in the right manner towards God’s people, with whom I so fully sympathize in spirit. I wonder if I really am in the Church! My childish consecration was sincere; I entered the communion of the sect in which I was baptized and brought up, from an earnest longing to come nearer to Christ,--a desire which has grown with me through all the years; only now it reaches out beyond all names and groupings, towards the whole Communion of Saints in Him. Nothing less than this is the real Church to me. Some narrowness I find in every denomination, and this distresses and repels me, so that I cannot tell where I belong. Yet when I go to Trinity Church, I feel myself taken possession of, borne upward on the tide of loving loyalty to Christ; and I know that it has not been well for me to live apart from my kindred. I wish I could find myself among the group who consecrate themselves to-night: but, as you once said to me, if that were the way for me, it would be made plain. And I shall consider Trinity as home, whenever I am in Boston. I did have one little request to make,--it was liberty to use some paragraphs from your printed sermons in a compilation which I may prepare this year. I shall take it that I have permission, unless forbidden. Faithfully yours, LUCY LARCOM. TO ---- December 3, 1885. I heard Canon Farrar preach and lecture. He is not remarkable, it seems to me, except for his moral and spiritual earnestness, but that is remarkable, as men go. I liked his lecture, for it will help to foster a good feeling between us two brother nations of the English race. England and America ought to feel themselves one.... When the summer came, Miss Larcom always looked forward with pleasure to her mountain-homes, of which she had a number, in New Hampshire and Maine. The hills gave her rest; and the beauty of the views, with the grand distances, suggesting freedom and the thought of being above the common level, gave her inspiration for her work. Each year she tried to visit the various points she loved--Ossipee Park, The Notch, Bethlehem, Moosilauke, Bethel, Centre Harbor, and Berlin Falls. Bethel fascinated her with its sight of the Androscoggin and its majestic elms, and the view of Mt. Moriah and some of the Presidential Range,--Madison, Adams, and Washington. At Mr. John Russell’s Riverside Cottage she was always welcome; and back of the house, on the crest of the mountain, was a little glen, shaded by evergreens, in which she used to sit and read, called “Miss Larcom’s Retreat.” Sitting on the low bench, in this nook, she wrote the poem “On the Ledge:”--