n interesting companion. And yet she
was not generally liked. She was seldom understood. Her life was so
deep, her tone of thought so peculiar; and her dependence upon the
opinions of others so slight, that persons ordinarily could not 'make
her out,' as they said. Still she had very warm friends, and derived
great pleasure from their friendship. I have never seen any one derive
more. But she distrusted strangers; I mean their interest in her. She
did not expect new persons to care for her, and it took her a long while
to be sure that they did. I must myself confess, for the first and last
time, that until within two or three years I never met her after an
absence without being newly impressed with her exceeding homeliness. It
was a sin against friendship, I knew, and I was glad when I felt I was
free from it.'

'It was not so with me,' I said. 'After I became accustomed to her face
it never affected me unpleasantly. I did not see the features, but the
spirit which animated them.'

'Yes, you were with her continually, and, besides, she must have been so
completely identified in your mind with the relief of pain, that you
could think of her only as an angel of mercy. It was a great advantage
to her that she was always scrupulously neat in her dress and person;
and her clothes, too, were well put on, if without a great deal of
taste.

'Upon the whole, her life was a happy one, though not perhaps triumphant
except in periods of exaltation, for there was a large part of her
nature unsatisfied; but she was thoroughly contented, willingly living
as long as was necessary, glad to go whenever the time came. She never
expected to die young, but she did; she was only thirty-six.'

'She seemed older,' I said.

'Yes, she always looked older than she was, and then she had lived so
much that she necessarily impressed one as being old.

'She followed,' continued Mrs. Simmons, resuming her narrative, 'with
increasing interest the progress of the grand anti-slavery drama, until
that winter which, in defiance of all mathematical measurements, every
American _knows_ to be the longest in the annals of his country. With
fixed attention she watched every event, every indication. What next
would come she could not see, but she felt sure she should have some
part in it, whatever it was. At length the signal gun pealed forth, the
first shot was fired, the spell was broken. She wrote me, 'America calls
her sons and daughters. Up! up! to w