far in
advance of the spring in her native State, gave her the utmost pleasure;
but as the summer approached, her health began to suffer. The heat was
very intense, and hot weather always affected her unhappily. "I feel,"
she wrote, "as if I were in an oven with hot melted lead poured over my
brain." Her old trouble, too--"organic disease of the heart" it was now
suspected to be--caused her much discomfort. "While writing," she says
in one of her letters, "I am suffering excruciating pain; I can't call
it anything else." Her physical condition naturally affected more or
less her religious feelings. Under date of July 12th, she writes:

The word _conflict_ expresses better than any other my general state
from day to day. I have seemed of late like a straw floating upon the
surface of a great ocean, blown hither and thither by every wind, and
tossed from wave to wave without the rest of a moment. It was a mistake
of mine to imagine that God ever intended man to rest in this world. I
see that it is right and wise in Him to appoint it otherwise.... While
suffering from my Saviour's absence, nothing interests me. But I was
somewhat encouraged by reading in my father's memoir, and in reflecting
that he passed through far greater spiritual conflicts than will
probably ever be mine.... I see now that it is not always best for us to
have the light of God's countenance. Do not spend your time and strength
in asking for me that blessing, but this--that I may be transformed into
the image of Christ in His own time, in His own way.

Early in August she left Richmond and flew homeward like a bird to its
nest.

* * * * *

III.

Extracts from her Richmond Journal.

Were her letters to her cousin the only record of Miss Payson's Richmond
life, one might infer that they give a complete picture of it; for they
were written in the freedom and confidence of Christian friendship, with
no thought that a third eye would ever see them. But it had another and
hidden side, of which her letters contain only a partial record. Her
early habit of keeping a journal has been already referred to. She kept
one at Richmond, and was prevented several years later from destroying
it, as she had destroyed others, by the entreaty of the only person who
ever saw it. This journal depicts many of her most secret thoughts and
feelings, both earthward and heavenward. Some passages in it are of
too personal a nature for publi