“I have no advice to give you except that you shall be _yourself_, instead of following the kind suggestions of any Mrs. Grundy who has an ideal pattern of the ‘Minister’s Wife’ ready for you to copy. I am confident that you will be ‘helpmeet’ for the _man_, and since he will ask no more, his parish has no right to do it. “My warm regards to Mr. Campbell. When I see him I will congratulate him. You would not deliver the messages I would send to him. ‘Eddie’ sends a kiss to ‘Auntie Effie.’” In folding, almost reverently, the time-dyed letter and laying it beside the rest in the box at the bottom of which I found the sallowed “P.P.C.” card, date of “September 2, 1856,” I feel as if I were shutting the door and turning the key upon that far-away time; bidding farewell to a state of society that seems, by contrast with the complex interests of To-day, pastoral in simplicity. In reviewing the setting and scenes of my early history, I am reading a quaint chronicle, inhaling an atmosphere redolent of spices beloved of our granddames, and foreign to their descendants. It is not I who have told the story, but the girl from provinces that are no more on earth than if they had never been. The Spirit of that Past is the narrator. I sit with her by the open “chimney-piece,” packed as far as arms can reach with blazing hickory logs; as she talks, the imagery of a yet older day comes to my tongue. We knew our Bibles “by heart” in both senses of the term, then, and believed in the spiritual symbolism of that perfervid love-Canticle—the song of the Royal Preacher. I find myself whispering certain musical phrases while the tale goes on, and the story-teller’s face grows more rapt: “Thy lips drop as the honey-comb; honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon; “Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard; “Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon.” It is not a mystic love-chant, or a dreamy jargon, that I recite under my breath. The sadly few (more sad and few with each year) who recall with me the days that are no more—and forever—will feel what I cannot put into words. Soon after the dawn of the year 1858, we had news of the death of my husband’s youngest sister, a bright, engaging matron, of whom I had grown very fond in my visits to her New Jersey home. The happy wife of a man who adored her, and the mother of a beautiful boy, she had but one unfulfilled wish on earth. When a baby-girl was put into her arms, she confessed this, and that now she could ask nothing more of heaven. The coveted gift cost her her life.