I now enter upon the most painful part of her story, and I do it with a heavy heart; but I feel obliged to tell it, because it illustrates so well the lives which so many “solitary” women were then forced to lead,--lives of poverty, of self-abnegation, and of unselfishness. And in reading, in her letters to me, the sad record of her struggles, I can truly say, that never in all my life of over seventy years have I known of one so cruelly compelled by circumstances to hide the talent which “God had given her,” that she might become the angel of mercy to her suffering and needy relatives. In the heyday of her literary career, she left the work for which she was the best fitted, to take the sole charge of her blind and aged mother, who lived until 1858, “having suffered all that mortal could suffer.” Harriot was her constant attendant day and night, vainly trying, in the mean while, to get some literary work to do at her home to help eke out the narrow income of the family. Extracts from her letters written to my husband and myself will give some idea of her struggles to obtain remunerative employment. SUNNY HILL, DRACUT, _Jan. 7, 1849_. _Dear, dear Friends_,--Your kind letter reached me on Friday; and if you could imagine the “heaps” of good it did me, you would favor me often with such medicine. Nobody writes to me nowadays, and I am left to my despair and desolation.... Oh dear! what a world this is for poor old maids! but I trust _you_ find it quite comfortable and Paradise-like for brides and bridegrooms, God bless them all! and more especially you young ones.... I wish you would show me how I could “earn” anything by writing. I cannot find my way only to write a book, be months about it, and then get a whole $100 for it. That don’t pay enough for wear and tear of temper. Later, in 1860, she writes from the family home in St. Albans, Vt.