personal letters. The book was hardly under way before the storm of them
set in. It began like a New England snow-storm, with a few large,
earnest flakes; then came the swirl of them, big and little, sleet and
rain, fast and furious, regular and irregular, scurrying and tumbling
over each other through the Andover mails.

The astonished girl bowed her head before the blast at first, with a
kind of terrified humility. Then, by degrees, she plucked up heart to
give to each letter its due attention.

It would not be very easy to make any one understand, who had not been
through a closely similar experience, just what it meant to live in the
centre of such a whirlwind of human suffering.

It used to seem to me sometimes, at the end of a week's reading of this
large and painful mail, as if the whole world were one great outcry.
What a little portion of it cried to the young writer of one little book
of consolation! Yet how the ear and heart ached under the piteous
monotony! I made it a rule to answer every civil letter that I received;
and as few of them were otherwise, this correspondence was no light
load.

I have called it monotonous; yet there was a curious variety in
monotony, such as no other book has brought to the author's attention.
The same mail gave the pleasant word of some distinguished writer who
was so kind as to encourage a beginner in his own art, or so much kinder
as gently and intelligently to point out her defects; and beneath this
welcome note lay the sharp rebuke of some obscure parishioner who found
the Temple of Zion menaced to its foundation by my little story. Hunters
of heresy and of autograph pursued their game side by side. Here, some