e only time in my life that I have tired myself out with
crossing bridges to which I never came.

Another trial confronted me in the shape of an ideal but impossible
patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were
learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a
bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I
was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best to begin mine early.

So I collected a few squares of calico, and undertook to put them
together in my usual independent way, without asking direction. I liked
assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were
scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons
who wore them. One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me.
It was a delicate pink and brown sea-moss pattern, on a white ground, a
piece of a dress belonging to my married sister, who was to me bride
and angel in One. I always saw her face before me when I unfolded this
scrap,--a face with an expression truly heavenly in its loveliness.
Heaven claimed her before my childhood was ended. Her beautiful form
was laid to rest in mid-ocean, too deep to be pillowed among the soft
sea-mosses. But she lived long enough to make a heaven of my childhood
whenever she came home.

One of the sweetest of our familiar hymns I always think of as
belonging to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her spirit and
mine. She had come back to us for a brief visit, soon after her
marriage, with some deep, new experience of spiritual realities which
I, a child of four or five years, felt in the very tones of her voice,
and in the expression of her eyes.

My mother told her of my fondness for the hymn-book, and she turned to
me with a smile and said, "Won't you learn one hymn for me--one hymn
that I love very much?"

Would I not? She could not guess how happy she made me by wishing me to
do anything for her sake. The hymn was,--

"Whilst Thee I seek, protecting Power."

In a few minutes I repeated the whole to her and its own beauty,
pervaded with the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at once
indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it to her again,
deepened with a lifetime's meaning, beyond the sea, and beyond the
stars.

I could dream over my patchwork, but I could not bring it into
conventional shape. My sisters, whose fingers had been educated,
called my sewing "gobblings." I grew disgusted with