ill, and if so His will be done. Let Him take all--and if He leaves
us Himself we still have all and abound." The next day he writes:

Still God is kind to us. Louisa and the babe continue as well as we
could desire. Truly, my cup runs over with blessings. I can still
scarcely help thinking that God is preparing me for some severe trial;
but if He will grant me His presence as He does now, no trial can seem
severe. Oh, could I now drop the body, I would stand and cry to all
eternity without being weary: God is holy, God is just, God is good;
God is wise and faithful and true. Either of His perfections alone is
sufficient to furnish matter for an eternal, unwearied song. Could I
sing upon paper I should break forth into singing, for day and night I
can do nothing but sing "Let the saints be joyful," etc., etc. But I
must close. I can not send so much love and thankfulness to my parents
as they deserve. My present happiness, all my happiness I ascribe under
God to them and their prayers.

Surely, a home inspired and ruled by such a spirit was a sweet home to
be born into!

The notices of Elizabeth's childhood depict her as a dark-eyed, delicate
little creature, of sylph-like form, reserved and shy in the presence of
strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies.
"Until I was three years old mother says I was a little angel," she once
wrote to a friend. Her constitution was feeble, and she inherited from
her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "I never knew what it
was to feel well," she wrote in 1840. Severe pain in the side, fainting
turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less,
from infancy. She had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick
to catch its varying aspects of light and beauty, whether on land
or sea. The ships and wharves not far from her father's house, the
observatory and fort on the hill overlooking Casco Bay, the White
Mountains far away in the distance, Deering's oaks, the rope-walk, and
the ancient burying-ground--these and other familiar objects of "the
dear old town," commemorated by Longfellow in his poem entitled "My Lost
Youth," were indelibly fixed in her memory and followed her wherever she
went, to the end of her days. In her movements she was light-footed,
venturesome to rashness, and at times wild with fun and frolic. Her
whole being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things
painful stamped themselves upon it a