Very unlike her age was this ignorant dress-maker of the nineteenth century. Ask the men and women of the day to read volumes; why, there is not a season but they go through the Herculean labour of swallowing down histories written faster than time flies, novels by the dozen, essays, philosophic and political, books of travels, of science, of statistics, besides the nameless host of reviews, magazines, and papers, daily and weekly. Ask them to study: why, what is there they do not know, from the most futile accomplishment to the most abstruse science? Ask them too, if you like, to enter life, to view it under all its aspects; why, they have travelled over the whole earth; and life, they know from the palace down to the hovel; but bid them think! They stare aghast: it is the task of Sisyphus--the labour of the Danaide; as fast as thought enters their mind, it goes out again. Bid them commune, one day with God and their own hearts--they reply dejectedly that they cannot; for their intellect is quick and brilliant, but their heart is cold. And thought springs from the heart, and in her heart had Rachel Gray found it. The task impossible to them was to her easy and delightful. Time wore on; deeper and more exquisite grew what Rachel quaintly termed to herself "the pleasure of thinking." And oh! she thought sometimes, and it was a thought that made her heart bum, "Oh! that people only knew the pleasures of thinking! Oh! if people would only think!" And mom, and noon, and night, and bending over her work, or sitting at peaceful twilight time in the little back room, Rachel thought; and thus she went on through life, between those two fair sisters, Thought and Prayer. Reader, hare you known many thinkers? We confess that we hare known many men and women of keen and great intellect, some geniuses; but only one real thinker have we known, only one who really thought for thought's own sake, and that one was Rachel Gray. And now, if she moves through this story, thinking much and doing little, you know why. CHAPTER IV. It was not merely in meditation that Rachel indulged, when she sought the little room. The divine did not banish the human from her heart; and she had friends known to her, but from that back room window; but friends they were, and, in their way and degree, valued ones.