There was in our home, as in most homes of its class of that day, a deep tradition of family affection. We were told, I cannot imagine how early, that we must love one another. In the prayers we said at night, tiny as we three youngest ones were, we asked God severally to bless each member of the household, naming them, before we severally asked Him to “make us a good girl”; and these petitions, linked with a shadow and possibility of our perhaps “dying before we waked,” gave love, I am inclined to think, in our inadequate conception of it a certain solemn tone. I was an impressionable child, and easily devoted. Besides my much elder brothers and sisters, I had two sisters rather close to my own age. A day came when the one nearest to me in years went away with some older relative, an aunt, I believe, to the East, for a long visit; eight months indeed. I know I must at first have missed her very much. But I think I had always a certain zest for life. The wind blew as mysteriously in the tree tops as it ever did; the birds built in quite as fascinating half-secret places; the lilacs waved incredible plumes announcing that the roses were about to arrive. Amid all this present glory the sister who was absent faded gradually, in my memory. Who can trace the beginnings of terror in early years? I wakened at last to the hideous realization that I had lost her; not in a bodily sense, not in a sense of absence or loneliness, for I knew she was in the world still, but in a terrible sense--as though a witch had caught me by the hair, or I had caught my feet in the hideous net of some spell--she was obliterated--_I could not remember what she looked like!_ There are terrors of many kinds in life. I know. I have met not a few; but for abysmal terror, that realization, it sometimes seems to me, leads them all. Blackness without a gleam of light, depth without a bottom. Downright mental panic. I know I made a few desperate efforts. “Jeanette!” Her name I knew, and often heard spoken; I could remember things she had done and said; but not form or feature. My mother was away that day; but I was blessed by a special providence with an older sister some seventeen years older than myself--who was compounded of all that was best and most sympathetic in the world. I rushed to her; was held close in her arms; but could tell her nothing for sobbing. When she at last got the circumstances from me, her delicate handling of it was, I think, very nearly as good as the mercy of God; only it was debonair besides, in good measure. She kissed me, and laughed, and said that she was just thinking that minute that in all that time Jeanette might have forgotten what I looked like! (Think of the delicacy of her putting it that way!) So, let us go to the photographer’s and have a little tintype taken of myself; let us send it this very day to Jeanette; and let us ask her to send us one of herself in return.