And—at my suggestion that adverse criticism was wholesome for the tyro—“Why should I look for faults when there is so much good to be seen without searching?” A woman of an utterly different type sounded the same note a score of years afterward. I said to Frances Willard, whose neighbor I was at a luncheon given in her honor by the wife of the Commandant at Fort Mackinac: “You know, Miss Willard, that, as General Howard said just now of us, you and I ‘don’t train in the same band.’” “No?” The accent and the sweet candor, the ineffable womanliness of the eyes that sought mine, touched the spring of memory. “Suppose, then, we talk only of the many points upon which we do agree? Why seek for opposition when there are so many harmonies close at hand?” Of such peacelovers and peacemakers is the kingdom of heaven, by whatsoever name they are called on earth. Mrs. Ritchie was a Swedenborgian. I had learned that in her _Autobiography of an Actress_. All denominations—including some whose adherents would not sit down to the Lord’s Supper with certain others, and those who would not partake of the consecrated “elements” if administered by non-prelatic hands—united in shutting and bolting the door of heaven in her face. In the intimate companionship, unbroken by these and other admonitions, I never heard from Mrs. Ritchie’s lips a syllable that was not redolent with the law of kindness. I learned to love her fondly and to revere her with fervor I would not have believed possible, six months earlier. It was not her fascination of manner alone that attracted me, or the unceasing acts of sisterly kindness she poured upon me, that deepened my devotion. She opened to me the doors of a new world: broadened and deepened and sweetened my whole nature. We never spoke of doctrines. We rarely had a talk—and henceforward our meetings were almost daily—in which she did not drop into my mind some precious grain of faith in the All-Father; of love for the good and noble in my fellow-man and of compassion, rather than blame, for the erring. Of her own church she did not talk. She assumed, rather, that we were “one family, above, beneath,” and bound by the sacred tie of kinship, to “do good and to communicate.” She had a helpful hand, as well as a comforting word, for the sorrowing and the needy. As to her benefactions, I heard of them, now and again, from others. Now it was an aged gentlewoman, worn down to the verge of nervous prostration, and too poor to seek the change of air she ought to have, who was sent at the Ritchies’ expense to Old Point Comfort for a month; or a struggling music-mistress, for whom Mrs. Ritchie exerted herself quietly to secure pupils; or a girl whose talent for elocution was developed by private lessons from the ex-actress; or a bedridden matron, who had quieter nights after Mrs. Ritchie ran in, two or three evenings in a week, to read to her for half an hour in the rich, thrilling voice that had held hundreds enchanted in bygone days.