MARCH 4.-Dear father has gone. We were all kneeling and praying and weeping around him, when suddenly he called me to come to him. I went and let him lean his head on my breast, as he loved to do. Sometimes I have stood so by the hour together ready to sink with fatigue, and only kept up with the thought that if this were my own precious father's bruised head I could stand and hold it forever. "Daughter Katherine," he said, in his faint, tremulous way, "you have come with me to the very brink of the river. I thank God for all your cheering words and ways. I thank God for giving you to be a helpmeet to my son. Farewell, now," he added, in a low, firm voice, "I feel the bottom, and it is good!" He lay back on his pillow looking upward with an expression of seraphic peace and joy on his worn, meagre face, and so his life passed gently away. Oh, the affluence of God's payments! What a recompense for the poor love I had given my husband's father, and the poor little services I had rendered him! Oh, that I had never been impatient with him, never smiled at his peculiarities, never in my secret heart felt him unwelcome to my home! And how wholly I overlooked, in my blind selfishness, what he must have suffered in feeling himself, homeless, dwelling with us on sufferance, but master and head nowhere on earth! May God carry the lessons home to my heart of hearts, and make the cloud of mingled remorse and shame which now envelops me to descend in showers of love and benediction on every human soul that mine can bless! Chapter 20 XX. APRIL. I HAVE had a new lesson which has almost broken my heart. In looking over his father's papers, Ernest found a little journal, brief in its records indeed, but we learn from it that on all those wedding and birthdays, when I fancied his austere religion made him hold aloof from our merry-making, he was spending the time in fasting and praying for us and for our children! Oh, shall I ever learn the sweet charity that thinketh no evil, and believeth all things? What blessings may not have descended upon us and our children through those prayers! What evils may they not have warded off! Dear old father! Oh, that I could once more put my loving arms about him and bid him welcome to our home! And how gladly would I now confess to him all my unjust judgments concerning him and entreat his forgiveness! Must life always go on thus? Must I always be erring, ignorant and blind? How I hate this arrogant sweeping past my brother man; this utter ignoring of his hidden life?