and a strange friendship began and
developed between the woman of the town and the little girl she loved.
Some of those visits I remember as vividly as if I had made them
yesterday. There was never the slightest suggestion during any of them
of things I should not see or hear, for while I was with her my hostess
became a child again, and we played together like children. She had
wonderful toys for me, and pictures and books; but the thing I loved
best of all and played with for hours was a little stuffed hen which she
told me had been her dearest treasure when she was a child at home. She
had also a stuffed puppy, and she once mentioned that those two things
alone were left of her life as a little girl. Besides the toys and books
and pictures, she gave me ice-cream and cake, and told me fairy-tales.
She had a wonderful understanding of what a child likes. There were half
a dozen women in the house with her, but I saw none of them nor any of
the men who came.

Once, when we had become very good friends indeed and my early shyness
had departed, I found courage to ask her where the ghost was--the ghost
that haunted her house. I can still see the look in her eyes as they
met mine. She told me the ghost lived in her heart, and that she did
not like to talk about it, and that we must not speak of it again. After
that I never mentioned it, but I was more deeply interested than ever,
for a ghost that lived in a heart was a new kind of ghost to me at
that time, though I have met many of them since then. During all our
intercourse my mother never entered the house next door, nor did my
mysterious lady enter our home; but she constantly sent my mother secret
gifts for the poor and the sick of the neighborhood, and she was always
the first to offer help for those who were in trouble. Many years
afterward mother told me she was the most generous woman she had ever
known, and that she had a rarely beautiful nature. Our departure for
Michigan broke up the friendship, but I have never forgotten her; and
whenever, in my later work as minister, physician, and suffragist, I
have been able to help women of the class to which she belonged, I have
mentally offered that help for credit in the tragic ledger of her life,
in which the clean and the blotted pages were so strange a contrast.

One more incident of Lawrence I must describe before I leave that city
behind me, as we left it for ever in 1859. While we were still there
a number of Law