For a week these angels of mercy nursed and fed the starving men, the Indian meanwhile having shot a mountain goat, which increased their supplies, and at the end of that period the men were sufficiently recruited to start, in company with their preservers, for the camp, where Mr. Peterson was awaiting the return of his daughters, of whose safety he had been already informed by the Indian. When the rescued men came to bid them farewell, they brought a bag containing a hundred pounds weight of gold dust, the price for which would have been their lives, but for those devoted women, and begged them to accept it, not as a reward, but as a token of their gratitude. The girls refused to take the gift, believing that the adventurous miners needed it, and that they had been amply rewarded by the reflection that they had saved seven lives. The parting, on both sides, was tearful, the rough miners being more affected than even the women. Each party pursued its separate course, the one towards Oregon, the other towards Utah; but after the Petersons had reached the spot where they encamped that night, they discovered the bag of gold, which the miners had secretly deposited in the wagon. The treasure thus forced upon them was divided between the Miss Petersons and their sister-in-law. Bright and pure as that metal was, it was incomparably less lustrous than the deeds which it rewarded, and infinitely less pure than the motives which prompted them. Finely has a poet of our own time celebrated the wondrous power of those words of cheer and comfort which woman utters so often to the unfortunate. O! ever when the happy laugh is dumb, All the joy gone, and all the sorrow come, When loss, despair, and soul-distracting pain, Wring the sad heart and rack the throbbing brain, The only hope--the only comfort heard-- Comes in the music of a woman's word. Like beacon-bell on some wild island shore, Silverly ringing through the tempest's roar, Whose sound borne shipward through the ocean gloom Tells of the path and turns her from her doom. Acting within their own homes, who can sum up the entire amount of good which the frontier wife, mother, sister, and daughter have accomplished in their capacities as emotional and sympathetic beings? How many fevered brows have they cooled, how many gloomy moods have they illumined, how many wavering hearts have they stayed and confirmed? This service of the heart is rendered so freely and so often that it ceases to attract the attention it merits. Like the vital air and sunshine, it is so free and spontaneous that one rarely pauses to thank God for it. The outflow of sympathy, the kind word or act, and all the long sacrifice of woman's days pass too often without a thought, or a word, from those who perhaps might droop and die without them.