"Your letter presented to my 'mind's eye' our mountain home. I entered the lower gate, passed up the lane between the elms, maples, and cherries, and saw once more our mountain home embowered by the fir-trees and shrubbery I loved so well. How many times have I watched the first buddings of those rose-bushes and lilacs, and with what care and delight have I nursed those snowballs, half dreaming they were sister spirits, telling by their delicate purity of that Eden where flowers never fade and leaves never wither. Perhaps I was too passionately fond of flowers; if so, that fondness is sufficiently blunted, if not subdued. Not a solitary shrub, tree, or flower rears its head near our dwelling, excepting those of nature's planting at no great distance on the opposite side of the St. Peter's, and a copse of plums in a dell on the left, and of scrub-oak on the right. Back of us is the river hill which shelters us from the furious wind of the high prairie beyond. Until last season we have had no enclosure, and now we have but a poor defence against the depredations of beasts, and still more lawless and savage men. On reading descriptions of the situation of our missionary brethren and sisters in Beirut, Jerusalem, and elsewhere, the thought has arisen, 'That is such a place as I should like to call home.' But the remembrance of earthquakes, war, and the plague, by which those countries are so often scourged, hushed each murmuring thought. When I also recollected the mysterious providences which have written the Persian missionaries _childless_, how could I long or wish to possess more earthly comforts, while my husband and our two 'olive plants' are spared to sit around our table. Little Bella already creeps to her father, and, if granted a seat on his knee, holds her little hands, although, as Alfred says, 'she does not wait till papa says amen.' While we are surrounded by so many blessings, I would not, like God's ancient people, provoke him by murmuring, as I fear I have done, and if he should deprive us of any of the comforts we now possess, may he give us grace to feel as did Habakkuk, 'Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vine, etc., yet I will rejoice in the Lord and joy in the God of my Salvation.'