MARCH 4.-Dear father has gone. We were all kneeling and praying and
weeping around him, when suddenly he called me to come to him. I went
and let him lean his head on my breast, as he loved to do. Sometimes
I have stood so by the hour together ready to sink with fatigue, and
only kept up with the thought that if this were my own precious
father's bruised head I could stand and hold it forever.

"Daughter Katherine," he said, in his faint, tremulous way, "you have
come with me to the very brink of the river. I thank God for all your
cheering words and ways. I thank God for giving you to be a helpmeet
to my son. Farewell, now," he added, in a low, firm voice, "I feel
the bottom, and it is good!"

He lay back on his pillow looking upward with an expression of
seraphic peace and joy on his worn, meagre face, and so his life
passed gently away.

Oh, the affluence of God's payments! What a recompense for the poor
love I had given my husband's father, and the poor little services I
had rendered him! Oh, that I had never been impatient with him, never
smiled at his peculiarities, never in my secret heart felt him
unwelcome to my home! And how wholly I overlooked, in my blind
selfishness, what he must have suffered in feeling himself, homeless,
dwelling with us on sufferance, but master and head nowhere on earth!
May God carry the lessons home to my heart of hearts, and make the
cloud of mingled remorse and shame which now envelops me to descend
in showers of love and benediction on every human soul that mine can
bless!