me--entreaties, outpourings, cries of agony, mutterings of despair,
breathings of the gentle hope by which despair may be superseded;
appeals for help which only the Almighty could have given; demands for
light which only eternity can supply.

A man's grief, when he chooses to confide it to a woman, is not an easy
matter to deal with. Its dignity and its pathos are never to be
forgotten. How to meet it, Heaven only teaches; and how far Heaven
taught that awed and humbled girl I shall never know.

But the women--oh, the poor women! I felt less afraid to answer them.
Their misery seemed to cry in my arms like a child who must be
comforted. I wrote to them--I wrote without wisdom or caution or skill;
only with the power of being sorry for them, and the wish to say so; and
if I said the right thing or the wrong one, whether I comforted or
wearied, strengthened or weakened, that, too, I shall not know.

Sometimes, in recent years, a letter comes or a voice speaks: "Do you
remember--so many years ago--when I was in great trouble? You wrote to
me." And I am half ashamed that I had forgotten. But I bless her because
_she_ remembers.

But when I think of the hundreds--it came into the thousands, I
believe--of such letters received, and how large a proportion of them
were answered, my heart sinks. How is it possible that one should not
have done more harm than good by that unguided sympathy? If I could not
leave the open question to the Wisdom that protects and overrules
well-meaning ignorance, I should be afraid to think of it. For many
years I was snowed under by those mourners' letters. In truth, they have
not ceased entirely yet, though of course their visits are now
irregular.

I am so often asked if I still believe the views of another life set
forth in "The Gates Ajar" that I am glad to use this opportunity to
answer the question; though, indeed, I have been led to do so, to a
certain extent, in another place, and may, perhaps, be pardoned for
repeating words in which the question first and most naturally answered
itself:

"Those appeals of the mourning, black of edge and blurred with tears,
were a mass high beneath the hand and heavy to the heart. These letters
had the terrible and unanswerable power of all great, natural voices;
and the chiefest of these are love and grief. Year upon year the
recipient has sat dumb before these signs of human misery and hope. They
have rolled upon the shore of life, a billow of s