eing, indeed, seemed to gather new light and sweetness from
the sharp discipline she had been passing through. Even when most tried
and tempted, as has been said, she had kept her trouble to herself; few
of her most intimate friends knew of its existence; to the world she
appeared a little more thoughtful and somewhat careworn, but otherwise
as bright as ever. But now, at length, the old vivacity and playfulness
and merry laugh began to come back again. Never did her heart glow with
fresher, more ardent affections. In a letter to a young cousin, who was
moving about from place to place, she says:

I shall feel more free to write often, if you can tell me that the
postmaster at C. forwards your letters from the office at no expense to
you, as he ought to do. It is very silly in me to mind your paying three
cents for one of my love-letters, but it's a Payson trait, and I can't
help it, though I should be provoked enough if you _did_ mind paying a
dollar apiece for them. There's consistency for you! Well, I know, and
I'm awfully proud of it, that you'll get very few letters from as loving
a fountain as my heart is. I've got enough to drown a small army--and
sometimes when you're homesick, and cousin-Lizzy-sick, and friend-sick,
I shall come to you, done up in a sheet of paper, and set you all in a
breeze.

Her letters during the first half of this year were few, and relate
chiefly to those aspects of the Christian life with which her own
experience was still making her so familiar. "God's plan with most of
us," she wrote to Mrs. Humphrey, "appears to be a design to make us
flexible, twisting us this way and that, now giving, now taking; but
always at work for and in us. Almost every friend we have is going
through some peculiar discipline. I fancy there is no period in our
history when we do not _need_ and _get_ the sharp rod of correction. The
thing is to grow strong under it, and yet to walk softly." "I do not
care how much I suffer," she wrote to a friend, "if God will purge and
purify me and fit me for greater usefulness. What are trials but angels
to beckon us nearer to Him! And I do hope that mine are to be a blessing
to some other soul, or souls, in the future. I can't think suffering is
meant to be wasted, if fragments of bread created miraculously, were
not." She studied about this time with great interest the teaching of
Scripture concerning the baptism of the Holy Ghost. The work of the
Spirit had not before sp