d she would say,
"Quaker, you are kinder than you know."

She had never learned my name, nor had expressed a desire to know it: what
were names of things to her who had lost the things themselves?

"Thank thee, friend Jordan," I would say; and then we would sit and talk.
Sometimes she would do all the talking: at other times she let me join
her. With her confused mind it was perhaps the best work I could have had,
to try to let in a little light where darkness had been so long.

"We always love those the most who give us the most pleasure, do we not?"
she asked me.

I could not give her the reply she wanted, for friend Hicks's daughter had
given me considerable happiness; so I remained quiet.

"Then next to those I love, and who nightly shine down to me in long, cool
reaches of light from the stars, I love you, Quaker," she said.

"I thank thee," I replied.

"You should never thank for love," she said, "for it is a gift that
requires as much as it bestows."

"And yet they call thee crazed!" I said, and placed my hand upon her wild
dishevelled hair.

"But you Quakers never show any feeling," she went on, "and I suppose you
never love."

"Sometimes we do," said I.

She seemed to think I was made sorry by what she had spoken, for she
started. "What am I saying?" she exclaimed, "when you have shown me more
feeling than any one in the world; and maybe you love me a little."

"We should love our neighbors as ourselves."

"I want the stars," she began, weeping: "I want to reach them, to go to
them, to have the light in my mind that is gone out of it up to them."

I could say nothing, for my want was something akin to hers.

Many a wild night had she now, and friend Afton and I had often but sad
chances of keeping her within bounds: we had to watch her while she would
stand and call out to the far-off lights in the sky; and as, like a
prophet of old, she stood and repeated divine words of care and an
all-seeing love, she was grown softer and gentler, and her speech seemed
to come from one who understood what the words imparted to her hearers.
She was fond of saying the Psalms of David, and would weep at the touching
words of suffering, of joy and of exultation which that man, so many
thousand years dead, had been wont to sing as perchance he stood as she
now did, looking up to the same nightly skies and weeping as she now wept,
as his words rang through the ever-settled calmness of the night, and had
no answer