especially young Friends, as invited to do so, and to have communication with them on religious subjects. She was prevented by home circumstances from taking her full share in this service, but she was greatly interested in it, and the visits in which she took part were the means of developing the powers of sympathy and influence which were later on to come so fully into play. The health of Eliza Hunt, always precarious, was failing seriously in these later years, and Ann Hunt was much engaged in attendance upon her, assisted from time to time by Hannah Southall, whose timely aid on many occasions earned her the title of "Partner," so often afterwards given her by her much tried friend. At length, after a distressing illness, the object of so much care, the invalid of many years, died at an advanced age in April, 1874. Ann Hunt wrote thus to Hannah Southall about two months after : "First-day afternoon. "Thy sweet note is most cheering-comes in so seasonably on this day of something like funeral stillness and recollections. I seem to be passing through the parting now, in the solitary walks and such a long, long look back among places and things having touching, yes, far more associations. But how mercifully have the wounds been healed-is the bitterness tempered; and thy cordial, loving greeting bringing me heart to heart with you again, came like a beam of sunshine. I am so glad it is likely to suit you for me to come soon, but the time for leaving Bristol is a little uncertain." She seems to have left The Fort the day after this was written, taking refuge at first with Hannah C. Price, the faithful friend of many years. This Friend was remarkable for her Christian benevolence, which was shown in an unusual way. She had at different times adopted several orphans, for whom she cared in the kindest manner, and she had also taken charge of two motherless children, whose father was in a foreign land. One of these, a young man just starting in life, had died at her house some years before. Ann Hunt had been greatly interested in him, and there still exists in MS. an account which she wrote of the experience of his last days. To those nearer to her H. C. Price had also rendered kind and timely assistance, and it seemed fitting that Ann Hunt should. make this house her home until she had decided on one for herself, where she should begin life again independently and alone. CHAPTER III. "Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers, What souls possess themselves so pure? Tennyson. THE year marks a the tone of her correspon HE year 1874 marks a change in Ann Hunt's life, dence. This was more extensive than it had been before, and from this time material would be abundant, but for the fact that few of her letters of the earlier dates appear to have been preserved. It was some time before a house was found that seemed to suit her requirements, but the letters written during this interval show little anxiety on this head. She wrote thus from H. C. Price's to Hannah Southall : "12, South Parade, Clifton, "The house search seems almost at a standstill; there is nothing at all likely to look at, and some of my friends think I had better go into lodgings than take anything unsuitable. For the present it must be left. To-morrow, if all's well, I go to Ashley Down,* and dear Maria Hayward writes that they shall be ready for me after this week, so I do not feel driven into lodgings just yet. Hast thou thought, dearest, that it is six months this very morning since thou and I stood and knelt by that bed for the last time? How vividly is the scene before me now, though it seems in the far longer past. And then the turning away to a new phase of life begun already, new duties, new prospects-a weight which would have been overpowering but for the trust. Yes, dearest partner in it all, He is able to keep that which we have committed to Him, and from that day to this I can set my seal to the truth that He is able and abundantly willing to supply all our need. I need not tell thee that He has been very merciful and gracious unto me, short as I have fallen in an answerable walking, yet it has been so by the touch of His blessed Spirit upon my spirit, and by His gracious dealings outwardly [in] giving me thee and other dear loving friends in this time when I might otherwise have mourned for the dead and the living with a sense of desolation. But I must not fill up paper and time in this way, I want to allude to some things in thy letter of true interest. am very glad I met Elizabeth Comstock and know her style and spirit better than I could otherwise. She has a great gift in her power over the minds and souls of others, exercised perhaps in rather a wholesale way, and so we must not be surprised if it lacks some of those finer touches, and that adaptation to one's Christian and natural tastes, which specially The home of her dear friend Catherine B. Charleton at that time. endears and attracts personally-but perhaps this is my notion. Do not think I fastidiously undervalue her. Thy account of her service among you gives a high impression of its character, and I wish she or anyone else could stir us up. But I do not like that statement about our being lost or saved and the results. I doubt if our human faculties are equal to that kind of crystallization of solemn mysteries into epigrammatic sentences without risk of error. We can, as thou said, cordially accept the first part, 'We are not saved because we do right,' but to say, 'We are not lost because we sin, but we sin because we are lost," seems to me almost in direct contradiction to Scripture teaching, and liable to some of the most deplorable results of what we call Calvinism. Is it not better to confine our statements to what we do know and most surely believe, which equally magnifies the free grace whereby and wherein alone we have any hope, and [to] encourage all to take hold of it, to accept the offered salvation, and to be created anew unto good works as His workmanship in Christ Jesus, without making startling assertions which cut two ways, disheartening the honest seeker after Christ, when only intended to warn the selfrighteous? One shrinks so much from those hard keen lines of distinction some people try to draw in a region where there is no hold for them, where the darkness seems to dawn into the light, and the light shadow into the darkness by imperceptible degrees. I suppose we cannot conceive of any change taking place without there being some moment when the one condition passes into the other, but as respects that great change from the condition of the lost sinner to the sinner saved by grace, how often it is |