don, Paris was
visited, Southern England and Wales were explored, and finally the
Lovell relatives were visited and found to have good hearts and open
arms. For these eighteen months, Mary Pickard's friends could have
wished her no more delightful existence. She had tea with Mrs.
Barbauld, heard Irving, then the famous London preacher, and saw other
interesting persons and charming things in England. There is material
for a very interesting chapter upon this delightful experience. It was
followed by a drama of misery and horror, in which she was both
spectator and actor, when young and old died around her as if smitten
by pestilence, and her own vigorous constitution was irreparably
broken.

This episode was vastly more interesting to her than the pleasant
commonplace of travel, and much more in keeping with what seems to
have been her destiny. In the autumn of her second year abroad, she
went to discover her aunt, sister of Mr. Pickard, in Yorkshire. The
writer of the Memoirs says that this visit "forms the most remarkable
and in some respects the most interesting and important chapter of her
life." She found her aunt much better than she expected, nearly
overpowered with joy to see her, living in a little two story cottage
of four rooms, which far exceeded anything she ever saw for neatness.
The village bore the peculiarly English name of Osmotherly, and was
the most primitive place she had ever been in. The inhabitants were
all of one class and that the poorer class of laborers, ignorant as
possible, but simple and sociable. Terrible to relate, smallpox,
typhus fever, and whooping cough were at that moment epidemic in that
village.

It will be impossible to put the situation before us more briefly than
by quoting a passage from one of her letters: "My aunt's two daughters
are married and live in this village; one of them, with three
children, has a husband at the point of death with a fever; his
brother died yesterday of smallpox, and two of her children have the
whooping-cough; added to this, their whole dependence is upon their
own exertions, which are of course entirely stopped now.... You may
suppose, under such a state of things, I shall find enough to do."

The death of the husband, whom of course Miss Pickard nursed through
his illness, is reported in the next letter, which contains also this
characteristic statement, "It seems to me that posts of difficulty are
my appointed lot and my element, for I do fe