So it is with the human heart and its purposes. One by one, they come to the point of blossoming. If the sunshine of faith and the serene heaven of resolution meet the ripe hour, all is well; but if you faint, repel, delay, they wither at the core, and your crown is stolen from you,--your privilege set aside. Esau has sold his birthright, and the pottage has lost its savor. FOOTNOTES: [26] I am happy to find, on the authority of the "London Athenæum," that this statement was, when I wrote it, untrue. "Germany," it says, on the 23d of July, 1859,--"Germany has lost one of her most famed and eminent female scholars. Frau Dr. Heidenreich, _née_ Von Siebold, died at Darmstadt a fortnight ago. She was born in 1792, studied the science of midwifery at the Universities of Göttingen and Giessen, and took her doctor's degree in 1817; not, _honoris causâ_, by favor of the Faculty, but, like any other German student, by writing the customary Latin dissertation, as well as by bravely defending, in public disputation, a number of medical theses. After that, she took up her permanent abode at Darmstadt, indefatigable in the exercise of her special branch of science, and universally honored as one of its first living authorities." "Universally honored as one of its first living authorities," that was what I was in search of; and French and German papers confirm the statement. Dr. Heidenreich came of a family highly distinguished in her specialty. It was ancient and noble: she was a baroness in her own right. All readers of English works on midwifery know the authority given to the name of Von Siebold. Her father founded the famous hospital at Berlin; and her brother, still living, stands high in medical fame, having written the best history of midwifery extant. Rosa Bonheur, also, is as unquestionably at the head of her department as Sir Edmund Landseer. The three pictures Boston has had a chance to see this autumn ought to fill every woman's bosom with a glow of honest pride. I can find no better place than this, perhaps, to introduce the following facts, to which my attention has been directed by the kindness of Miss Mary L. Booth, of New York. In the History of Southold, N.Y.,--one of the oldest towns in the United States,--it appears that women have practised there as "doctresses" and "midwives" from the first settlement of the country. From 1740 to the present time,--more than one hundred years,--the town of Southold has had a trustworthy female physician. The first of these, Elizabeth King, who practised from 1740 until her death in 1780, attended at the birth of more than _one thousand_ children.