"The Open Secret" fascinates me; sometimes it looms up misty and awful for a moment, but when I fairly look, it has disappeared unread. Habitude is its safe mask. And that is one reason why habits seem half hateful to me, but I know this is not right. Oh, if I could but see! Two afternoons ago I was upon the street. A child was coming toward me with a basket on his arm; opposite, a servant cleared the sidewalk with her broom; just as I passed a forge where blackened men were working, a lady crossed the street ahead of me. The instant that I looked at her, a hint at the open secret of the universe flashed through me, taking away my breath. It went again an instant afterward. I can not tell you what it was, but oh the vastness of it weighed me down. Are we to read it in this life, I wonder, even when the Ripest Age has come? I almost think that no man shall look it in the face and live. We may talk of it, long for it, learn its alphabet, but with our last breath only shall it stand before us clear and perhaps terrible! Schiller's final words, "Many things grow plain to me," gives a hint of this. But oh, of late it is almost always in my thoughts, it winds itself in every reverie of Mary. I have thought of God to-day, of "that wonderful, wonderful world," as Mary called it in her incoherent sentences the last night that we ever slept together, when the misty depths beyond us seemed to have been penetrated a little way by her sweet spirit so soon to depart. Social life in this world blinds us and stupefies us as too much confectionery makes a child ill. The kind God of many a well-bred family on their knees around their glowing grate, with warm and sense-pleasing things about them, is little better than the Lares and Penates of Æneas and his people. He is a domestic God, or at least, He is the one we worship "in our church." This is said without bigotry by them, too, and only in memory of their luxuriously-cushioned pews, beautiful stained-glass windows and melodious organ, and with the thought of their well-dressed, gentle manly pastor, besides. I write this not in bitterness. I have seen that it is true. Oh, for a glimpse at Him who is without beginning and without limitation! We use these words, the wonder is that we have got so far, but a little bird raising its head in grateful acknowledgment to heaven as the water-drops pass down its throat, knows what the words mean as well as we do. Ecce Homo! Let us take that in as best we may.

I thought to-day of another church where often and often I have sat contentedly listening to what was given me to hear. Father and mother were no doubt in opposite corners of the old pew, to-day, and they have dreamed sadly of those who used to sit between, of me, of Oliver, away by the Rocky Mountains, of Mary, away by the River of Life. I have the feel. ing of one who walks blindfold among scenes too awful for his nerves to bear, in the midst of which we eat and drink, wash our faces and complain that the fire won't burn in the grate, or that the tea-bell does n't ring in season. We are like a spider's web in some remote angle of St. Peter's Cathedral. I suppose the cunning insects flurry greatly if a gnat flies past without being entrapped! All that appertains to the building from floor to dome is accidental in their sight.

A letter from Emma has made Pittsburgh with its smoke and forges to be quite forgotten for awhile, and put me into a Utopia all my own.

May 2. It is a queer place that I am in. I would give a good deal for a painting of the scene around me. Professor G.'s botany class, with a few invited friends, is spending the day among the hills. About thirty of us took the street-cars this morning and came out into a beautiful valley, took a long walk on the bank of the Ohio, amid charming scenery; climbed the highest hills, that I, a prairie girl, have ever seen, and are now encamped on Jack's Run, a murmuring little stream. The scene is picturesque. I am painfully conscious that my pen can do no justice to it, can hardly give a hint, a sign, to stand for its calm beauty. Perched nearly on the top of a queer mound of limestone, I am sitting, monarch of nothing that my eye surveys, and yet in my poverty content. I wish Emma could see me just now, or Luella Clark; they would know the costume, all black, with a little hat Emma has seen rising out of a hollow many times as I took my evening horseback ride and always went to her. The eye-glasses and veil drooping to one side would be less familiar, for I never wore eye-glasses until submerged in this Pittsburgh darkness in the midst of which I can not see my pupils in the chapel except by artificial aid. I think of Shirley, which I finished reading this morning and of Louis Moore. No female character in any book suits me, like Shirley. Such fire and freedom, such uncalculating devotion to a master, command my hearty admiration. Oh, so much better to wait for years and years, if we may hope to find at last the one who can be all things to the heart! I am glad, heartily glad, that I did not perjure myself in 1862. But I digress. The highest kind of hills inclose us; the water drips, drips, drips, over the uneven stones, and I listen while the music and the murmur sink into my heart and make me richer-natured for evermore. At my right a ledge of rocks rises perpendicularly, and on its top grow trees. At the foot of it a group of girls recline in various graceful attitudes, a botany among them, and a rare flower, a yellow trillium, going through the ordeal of analysis. Across the little stream is a small, white house, the home of some quiet farmer and those who love and look to him. A peach tree in full bloom is in his yard; his son, as I choose to think, sits in a chair by the open door, while he himself is plowing near by. The furrows are not those shining black ones that we used to like to walk on as they fell off from the plowshare, Mary and I. Two of the smaller girls run about gathering flowers; sweet, gleeful faces they have, their childish enthusiasm I look upon with smiles, partly in memory of my own sunny years of early life. It is a kind, sweet scene about me. Its beauty makes me glad. Thank God for this pleasant day of spring. All these things talk to me, though I can not translate every message which the wonderful, mysterious Power sends to me by way of bud and blossom, sky and tree. If only some one dear to me would take my hand and look into my eyes with wise, kind words to-day! If I might speak as I can not write what fills my heart, I should be as complete as we can be on earth. A rain-drop falls on the page as I am writing. A sudden shower, while the sun shines; the

group of girls below me scramble after hat and shawl. The day outside of town is passed. I too, must go; so, fair, gentle scene, good-by.

May 5.-Evening. Sitting in my room. What is it, I wonder, that I keep wanting to say? It never comes to my lips nor to the point of my pen. I am almost sure that God does not mean that I shall say this while I live on the earth, and yet it stirs in every pulse, it lies back of every true thought, but it has never yet been told. Some of my best essays are studies for it; sentences that I have hurriedly, earnestly, spoken to a friend's soul with which for the hour I was en rapport, have been guesses about it; the kindling eye and flushing cheek have told a little of it, but it will never be uttered right out loud except in deeds of happiness and valor; it lives on in my heart unsaid, and even in my prayers unsaid. It comes so strangely near me, how or why I can not tell. I have seen in the eyes of animals, so wistful, so hopeless in their liquid depths, some hint at what I mean. That mournful flower, the gentian, with its fringed corolla, is to me like the sweeping eyelash that directs a loving, revealing glance, and gives a new hint at that which I can feel, but can not tell. The dripping of water tries to spell out some simple words of it, and the blackbird's note or the robin's song, these help me wonderfully. The royal colored clouds of sunset make it clearer and a long gaze upward through the depths of the night,

"When the welkin above is all white,

All throbbing and panting with stars,"

makes the secret clearest of all. The thought of this, which I can only speak about, has been with me all day, like an ethereal perfume; has wrapped itself around me as a cloud of incense, and yet I have been through with the usual number of classes, absorbed the plain, substantial fare of breakfast, dinner and tea eagerly, and read the daily papers. Hooker's triumphant march thus far toward Richmond has made my heart beat faster than love or pride has done since the Garden City was left behind.

Two letters have been received from two poet-souled women in obscure life, and for the time they have transfigured me. Full of insight they were, for these women love much and read the significance of destiny by clear burning tapers lighted at the altar of consecration to their homes. I have read of the French Revolution, and Charlotte Corday, and the Unknown and Invisible has risen before me misty and dark as I wonder what vision burst on the freed soul of that marvelous girl as she lay on the plank of the scaffold and "the beam dropped, the blade glided, the head fell." I have listened to the Bible reading at our quiet chapel prayers, and pondered much over Job's words, "Why should a man contend against God?" and as I thought, my soul went out after Him, this awful, overwhelming Power that holds all things in equilibrium, and has come back again with some dim, shuddering consciousness that He is, and some sweet faith that "He is a rewarder of all such as diligently seek him." I have looked at my pliant, active fingers, and wondered over this strange, imparted force that is ordained to live a while in me, that joins itself in some weird way to muscle, sinew, tissue and bone; that filters through my nerves and make