The change of base which, years after this time, transformed Miss Martineau into an enthusiastic disbeliever would certainly not have seemed to Margaret an answer to her prayer. But as the doctrine that "God reveals himself in many ways" was not new to her, and as her petition includes the Eternities, we may believe that she appreciated the sincerity of her friend's negations, and anticipated for her, as for herself, a later vision of the Celestial City, whose brightness should rise victorious above the mists of speculative doubt. A serious illness intervened at this time, brought on, one might think, by the intense action of Margaret's brain, stimulated by her manifold and unremitting labors. For nine days and nights she suffered from fever, accompanied by agonizing pain in her head. Her beloved mother was at her bedside day and night. Her father, usually so reserved in expressions of affection, was moved by the near prospect of her death to say to her: "My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any _faults_. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault." These words were intended by him as a _viaticum_ for her, but they were really to be a legacy of love to his favorite child. Margaret herself anticipated death with calmness, and, in view of the struggles and disappointments of life, with willingness. But the threatened bolt was to fall upon a head dearer to her than her own. In the early autumn of the same year her father, after a two days' illness, fell a victim to cholera. Margaret's record of the grief which this affliction brought her is very deep and tender. Her father's image was ever present to her, and seemed even to follow her to her room, and to look in upon her there. Her most poignant sorrow was in the thought, suggested to many by similar afflictions, that she might have kept herself nearer to him in sympathy and in duty. The altered circumstances of the family, indeed, soon aroused her to new activities. Mr. Fuller had left no will, and had somewhat diminished his property by unproductive investments. Margaret now found new reason to wish that she belonged to the sterner sex, since, had she been eldest son instead of eldest daughter, she might have become the administrator of her father's estate and the guardian of her sister and brothers. She regretted her ignorance of such details of business as are involved in the care of property, and determined to acquaint herself with them, reflecting that "the same mind which has made other attainments can in time compass these." In this hour of trial she seeks and finds relief and support in prayer.