. The oaks and elms and chestnuts and
beeches from their trunks upward and outward to their minutest
twigs, and the pines and firs with their greenness shining through,
sparkled like diamonds and emeralds in the brightness of the sun.

O, it was a glorious morning, and we have seldom since been so young
in feeling as never we are sure in years, as when we walked forth
into its bracing air. And Aunt Rachel--she enjoyed it; the broad icy
fields, the difficult ascent of the steep slippery hills and the
"duckies" down them, and the crackling of the icicles as we thrust
our way through the bristling under-brush of those diamond-cressed
woods. We loved even to eat the icicles that hung from the pines
with their pungent flavour, strong as though their pointed leaves
had been steeped in boiling water. It was a pleasure to taste as
well as see the trees.

As we entered the "Main Road" and were passing along by the "Asylum
for the Insane," a clear, pleasant voice from one of the cells in
the upper story, accosted us: "Good morning, ladies." We looked up
and bowed in reply to the salutation. "It is a beautiful morning,"
he continued, "and I should like myself to take a walk down on 'Main
Street,' but my folks have sent me here to be shut up because they
say I am crazy, but I am sure I am not crazy, and I can't see why
they should think so." And we thought the same as we listened to the
calm, pleasant tones of his voice, till he added, "It will soon make
me beside myself to be with this wild, screaming set; and it doesn't
do them any good either to shut them up here. What they want is the
Grace of God, and I'll put the Grace of God into them."

His voice grew wild and excited, but we knew that a whole volume of
truth had been uttered in those simple words: "What they want is the
Grace of God."

The Grace of God. How many has it saved--rescued--from madness! how
have prayer and watchfulness been blest in conquering self, in
subduing rampant passion and the wild, disorderly vagaries of the
brain!

As we listen, the low whispered prayer of a Hall when he felt the
billows of angry passion about to sweep over his soul, "O, Lamb of
God, calm my perturbed spirit," we feel that but for such
interceding prayer and that watchfulness which accompanied it, the
insanity to which he was temporarily subject would have won the same
mastery over the mighty powers of his mind as over those of Swift,
and the glory of his "wide fame" as well as