fondest hopes and expectations,—­but alas! for human foresight and worldly wisdom!  The accomplishments and qualifications of a teacher were attained; and proudly we looked for the achievement of our long-contemplated design.  How hard to believe that the fell destroyer was upon her track!  Her education had qualified her for teaching the sciences; but now I saw, that her faith in the religion of the blessed Christ, was assisting her to teach her own heart a lesson of patience, and quiet submission to the will of Him who holds the issues of life,—­and Oh, how difficult for us to learn the solemn lesson, that her wasting form, her gradual sinking away, was hourly setting before us.

Slowly her strength failed; she, however, saw our sorrowful anxiety, and would try to relieve it with a cheerful appearance.  One day perhaps she would be able to walk about, which would revive our wavering hope; the next she was prostrate and suffering; then hope died and we were sad!  All the spring time she languished; the summer came, the roses bloomed, and the grain began to ripen, but she was wasting away.  The orchard yielded its golden harvest; the birds sang merrily on the trees, but a dark shadow had fallen on our hearthstone, and a gloom, like the pall of death, rested on our household.  Her place at table was already vacant; no longer she called the little ones about her to hear them repeat their tasks,—­all of which admonished us, that soon the bed where we could now see her, would be vacated; and we should no longer witness her patient smile, and know that she was still with us.  The pastor of the Baptist church often called to pray with, and for, the quiet sufferer, which she appreciated very highly, for she was a Christian in every sense of the word.

On the thirtieth day of August, at about eleven o’clock, A.M., without a struggle or a groan, her spirit returned to God who gave it.  “Sweetly as babes sleep,” she sank into the embrace of death.  Happily, triumphantly, had she seen the grim messenger approach; but she knew whom she had believed, and that He was able to keep that which she had committed to Him, unto the resurrection of the just.

She had previously made a confession of her faith in Christ, and had been buried with Him in baptism.  A few days after her demise, a long, sad train wound its way to the village church yard, where we deposited the remains of our beloved,—­Patience Jane Steward, in the eighteenth year of her age; and then returned to our desolate house, to realize that she had left a world of pain and sorrow, where the fairest rose conceals a thorn, the sweetest cup a bitter drop, for a home where the flowers would never fade, and where pain, sorrow and death will never come.  We all felt the solemn and impressive warning, “Be ye also ready, for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh.”

As often as I recalled her triumphant, peaceful death, her firm reliance on God, and sweet submission to His will, I could not forbear contrasting her departure with that of Mrs. Helm, whose death I have elsewhere described; and could fervently pray, that I might live the life of the righteous, that my last end might be like hers.