our very threshold as we return home.  And now I’m going to trot down to see Miss Lyman, whom I shall just take and hug, for I am so brimful of love to everybody that I must break somebody’s bones, or burst.  John preached delightfully yesterday; I wanted you there to hear.  But all my treasures are in earthen vessels; he seems all used up by his Sunday and scarcely touched his breakfast.  I don’t see how his or my race can be very long, if we live in New York.  All the more reason for running it well.  And what a blessed, blessed life it is, at the worst!  “Central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.”  Good-bye, dear; consider yourself embraced by a hearty soul that heartily loves you, and that soul lives in E. P.

On the 25th of October Mr. Charles H. Leonard, an old and highly esteemed friend, died very suddenly at his summer home in Rochester, Mass.  He was a man of sterling worth, generous, large-hearted, and endeared to Mrs. Prentiss and her husband by many acts of kindness.  He was one of the founders of the Church of the Covenant and had also aided liberally in building its pleasant parsonage.

To Miss Eliza A. Warner, New York, Oct. 26, 1868.

I am reminded as I write my date, that I am fifty years old to-day.  My John says it is no such thing, and that I am only thirty; but I begin to feel antiquated, dilapidated, and antediluvian, etc., etc.

I write to let you know that we are going to Rochester, Mass., to attend the funeral of a dear friend there.  It seems best for me to risk the wear and tear of the going and the coming, if I can thereby give even a little comfort to one who loves me dearly, and who is now left without a single relative in the world.  For twenty-four years these have been faithful friends, loving us better every year, members of our church in New Bedford, Mercer street, and then here.  They lived at Rochester during the summer and we visited them there (you may remember my speaking of it) just before we went to Dorset.  Mrs. Leonard was then feeling very uneasy about her husband, but he got better and seemed about as usual, till last Tuesday, when he was stricken down with paralysis and died on Saturday.  Somebody said that spending so large a portion of my time as I do in scenes of sorrow, she wondered God did not give me more strength.  But I think He knows just how much to give.  I have been to Newark twice since I wrote you.  Mrs. Stearns is in a very suffering condition; I was appalled by the sight; appalled at the weakness of human nature (its physical weakness).  But I got over that, and had a sweet glimpse at least of the eternal felicity that is to be the end of what at longest is a brief period of suffering.  I write her a little bit of a note every few days.  I feel like a ball that now is tossed to Sorrow and tossed back by Sorrow to Joy.  For mixed in with every day’s experience of suffering are such great, such unmerited mercies.