no one who did not know her well could have dreamed that she was in such
pain as consigns lower natures to disability. Her safeguard from utter
wreck was a clear and resolute faith, a profound and unfailing interest
in men and things and books, which gave strange vigor to her whole range
of intellectual activities. But above all she possessed that happiest of
gifts, the keen, undying sense of the humorous, the absurd, the witty.
As she once said, "All life laughs for me." It followed her to death, as
it has certain others as noble. When dying, she said some gay thing
which disturbed a dear friend. The sufferer, well knowing her own state,
looked up. "I must laugh, dear," she said; "I would not feel that the
other world was the good place I think it if I did not believe I could
laugh there too." She once said to me, in the midst of a storm of acute
suffering, that pain seemed to her a strange sort of a joke. I hardly
knew what she meant, but it shows the reigning mood of one who used to
better ends a life half pain than most of us use the untroubled health
of existence. Very irritable in youth, her clear brain and strong sense
of duty overcame it in proportion to the growth of what in others
creates it. All opiates she disliked, and could rarely be induced to
take them. "If my mind gets weaker, I shall go to pieces----;" and,
laughing always, "the bits would be worthless as the scattered bricks of
a sound house." Surely such a life is a fruitful lesson in the uses of
endurance, for be sure that both she and all around her were the better
and happier, yes, and she the less a sufferer, for her mode of dealing
with a life of pain.

The illustration I have given saves me from dwelling at great length on
the values of all the means within a woman's control for lessening the
evil consequences of suffering, and if to few is given the largest moral
and mental outfit for such a struggle, none are without the power to
cultivate what they have, and, in the lesser ills of life, to make use