make us feel, at evening, that the day was well
worth its fatigues.

I found my practical experience of housekeeping and baby-tending very
useful to me afterwards at the West, in my sister Emilie's family, when
she was disabled by illness. I think, indeed, that every item of real
knowledge I ever acquired has come into use somewhere or somehow in the
course of the years. But these were not the things I had most wished to
do. The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,--a world of
which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses, and I did not
like to feel the horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner
as this. And the worst of it was that I was getting too easy and
contented, too indifferent to the higher realities which my work and my
thoughtful companions had kept keenly clear before me. I felt myself
slipping into an inward apathy from which it was hard to rouse myself.
I could not let it go on so. I must be where my life could expand.

It was hard to leave the dear little fellow I had taught to walk and to
talk, but I knew he would not be inconsolable. So I only said "I must
go,"--and turned my back upon the sea, and my face to the banks of the
Merrimack.

When I returned I found that I enjoyed even the familiar, unremitting
clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on.
I liked to feel the people around me, even those whom I did not know,
as a wave may like to feel the surrounding waves urging it forward,
with or against its own will. I felt that I belonged to the world, that
there was something for me to do in it, though I had not yet found out
what. Something to do; it might be very little, but still it would be
my own work. And then there was the better something which I had almost
forgotten--to be! Underneath my dull thoughts the old aspirations were
smouldering, the old ideals rose and beckoned to me through the
rekindling light.

It was always aspiration rather than ambition by which I felt myself
stirred. I did not care to outstrip others, and become what is called
"distinguished," were that a possibility, so much as I longed to answer
the Voice that invited, ever receding, up to invisible heights, however
unattainable they might seem. I was conscious of a desire that others
should feel something coming to them out of my life like the breath of
flowers, the whisper of the winds, the warmth of the sunshine, and the
depth of the sky. That, I felt, did not re