Come, come.

I am getting really tired of your absence.

Saturday after Saturday comes round, and I can have no hope of hearing your knock at the door, and then being told that 'Miss E.is come.' Oh, dear! in this monotonous life of mine, that was a pleasant event.

I wish it would recur again; but it will take two or three interviews before the stiffness--the estrangement of this long separation--will wear away." About this time she forgot to return a work-bag she had borrowed, by a messenger, and in repairing her error she says:--"These aberrations of memory warn me pretty intelligibly that I am getting past my prime." AEtat 21! And the same tone of despondency runs through the following letter:-- "I wish exceedingly that I could come to you before Christmas, but it is impossible; another three weeks must elapse before I shall again have my comforter beside me, under the roof of my own dear quiet home.
If I could always live with you, and daily read the Bible with you--if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught, from the same pure fountain of mercy--I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be.

I often plan the pleasant life which we might lead together, strengthening each other in that power of self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion, which the first saints of God often attained to.
My eyes fill with tears when I contrast the bliss of such a state, brightened by hopes of the future, with the melancholy state I now live in, uncertain that I ever felt true contrition, wandering in thought and deed, longing for holiness, which I shall _never_, _never_ obtain, smitten at times to the heart with the conviction that ghastly Calvinistic doctrines are true--darkened, in short, by the very shadows of spiritual death.