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Rh father and mother when the wheels of life begin to drive heavily, the blotting out of the one bright face, and young voice, the falling back upon hirelings when the worn heart yearns for loving looks and words, is a loss and a sorrow surpassing speech.

While the home-circle was enlarged on one side, it was temporarily diminished on the other. Our oldest son had become the student of a college in a distant State, under the presidency of Right Rev. Bishop Philander Chase, the particular friend, and formerly the pastor of his father. The eldest daughter, the most beautiful one of our family, was at the celebrated French boarding-school of Madame Chegaray, in New York, while the youngest remained with us, a daily attendant of the Hartford Female Seminary, then under the charge of the distinguished Miss Catharine E. Beecher.

As my husband, soon after taking up his residence in Hartford, had become a member of the Episcopal Church, I considered it my duty to adopt his form of worship. Though attached to that in which I had been educated, it was not long ere I accounted this change a privilege, so impressive was the solemnity of its liturgy, the hallowed beauty of its ordinances, and its systematic commemoration of events in the life and death of our divine Redeemer. Especially did the pathos of its burial-service thrill through my soul. It soothed me to think that the tearful request might probably be granted made to my mother, when, a young child, I first heard