and our little ones we will treasure up among our precious blessings. . . . I wish to say to you that if you should think another summer's residence on Rhode Island would be beneficial to you, Mrs. Channing and myself would be glad to engage your services for our children. I dare not urge the arrangement, for I have an interest in it.".

For several successive winters, now, pulmonary weakness compelled Miss Dix to seek refuge from the severe winter climate of New England in Philadelphia, and in Alexandria, Va. She kept herself busy with reading of a very multifarious kind, poetry, science, biography, and travel, — besides eking out the scanty means she had laid by from her teaching by writing stories and compiling floral albums and books of devotion. The effect of illness was rarely to depress her spirits. Indeed, it must here be emphasized

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1 The following list of the various books written by Miss Dix, either while actually at work teaching, or while away seeking health, has been kindly furnished by Miss A. I. Appleton, of the Boston Athenæum :

1. Conversations on Common Things. Boston, Munroe & Francis, 1824. In 1869, this book had reached its sixtieth edition.

2. Hymns for Children, Selected and Altered. Boston, Munroe & Francis, 1825. Rearranged, Boston, 1833.

3. Evening Hours. Boston, Munroe & Francis, 1825.

4. Ten Short Stories for Children, 1827-28. Afterwards published under the title American Moral Tales for Young Persons. Boston, Leonard C. Bowles & B. H. Greene, 1832. Contents: John Williams, or The Sailor Boy; Little Agnes and Blind Mary; Robert Woodard, or The Heedless Boy; James Coleman, or The Reward of Perseverance; The Dainty Boy; Alice and Ruth; Marrion Wilder, The Passionate Little Girl; Sequel to Marrion Wilder; George Mills; The Storm.

5. Meditations for Private Hours. Boston, 1828. A number of subsequent editions.

6. The Garland of Flora. Boston, S. G. Goodrich & Co., 1829. 7. The Pearl, or Affection's Gift; A Christmas and New Year's Present. Philadelphia, 1829.

as a marked characteristic of her at once heroic and devout nature that suffering not only rallied to the front her powers of resistance, but actually induced a state of high spiritual exaltation. Throughout her whole future career, this will be strikingly apparent. Very interesting is it, then, to read, in the two following extracts from letters written while away in the South to Miss Heath, her own clear recognition of this constitutional trait:

"DEAR ANNIE, I am never less disposed to sadness than when ill and alone. Sometimes I have fancied that it was the nature of my disease to create a rising, elastic state of mind, but be that as it will (I speak solemnly), the hour of bodily suffering is to me the hour of spiritual joy. It is then that most I feel my dependence on God and his power to sustain. It is then that I rejoice to feel that, though the earthly frame decay, the soul shall never die. The discipline which has brought me to this has been long and varied: it has led through a valley of tears, a life of woe. It is happiness to feel progression, and to feel that the power that thus aids is not of earth."

Again, as presenting a vivid picture of how quickly any vision of sublimity or beauty, whether in the physical or the moral world, would lift her above bodily suffering into a state of transport and adoration, the following extract from a letter of this period is highly characteristic:

"Last night, dear Annie, I could not sleep, and after several restless hours rose at one o'clock, wrapped myself warmly in my flannel gown, and was in search of my medicine, when the remarkable clearness of the sky drew me to my window. There was Orion with his glittering sword and jeweled belt, Aldebaran, the fiery eye of Taurus, Saturn with his resplendent train of attendants, and the

sweet Pleiades; there, too, flamed Canicula and Procyon, beneath whose rival fires the beautiful star of evening had long since sunk from view; Leo with his glorious sickle followed in the train, and thousands on thousands of starry lamps lent their brightness to light up the vast firmament that canopied the silent earth, silent, for sleep had exerted its restoring influence upon all save the sick and sorrowing. I turned reluctantly again to seek my weary couch. feelings of gratitude to my God for all his past goodness and humble trust in his future care, I laid my head on my pillow, and though I could not sleep could meditate."

With

A more striking piece of unconscious self-portraiture could hardly be quoted than this. The image of that frail young woman rising on a cold winter night from her bed, exhausted with coughing and the sharp pain in her side, to seek her medicine, and suddenly finding relief in the sublime pageant of the midnight heavens, and in the adoration of the God whose glory it declared, this image indelibly stamped on the mind will give the keynote to a life that was destined to be a perpetual rising from pain and weariness to the beholding of a vision so transcendent in promised blessing for humanity as to inspire her with fairly supernatural strength. But not yet was her day of stern training over. Still farther must she learn to endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ; still farther to school an impatient and indomitable will to wait on the ordination of a Higher Power.

CHAPTER III.

THE ISLAND OF ST. CROIX.

IN alternation between summers spent with the family of Dr. Channing in Portsmouth, R. I., intermittent attempts at teaching, as in the then famous Fowle Monitorial School, and winters passed in more southern latitudes, the years went by till, in the au tumn of 1830, Miss Dix was invited by Dr. Channing to accompany his household, as instructress of his children, to the tropical island of St. Croix, in which he was himself to seek the recuperation of his greatly impaired health. The party sailed in the schooner Rice Plant from Boston, November 20, 1830, reaching their destination after a short and prosperous voyage. St. Croix, one of the West India Islands, belonging to Denmark, enjoyed in those days such repute for salubrity of climate as to be much sought as a refuge by delicate and consumptive patients from the United States. Twenty-three miles long by six in width, and crowned by the eminence of Blue Mountain rising to a height of eleven hundred feet, the proportion of land to the surrounding extent of the ocean made residence on it almost like being at sea.

A visit to the tropics had been looked forward to by Miss Dix with intense delight. Now she would see with her own eyes an utterly new flora and fauna, a literal paradise of trailing vines, palms, bananas, rare birds, shells, and marine plants. Indeed, it seems

here the most fitting place again to call attention to that vivid interest in all the branches of natural history, which unquestionably would have asserted itself as the dominant passion of her mind, had it not been overmastered by the still stronger passion for consecrating herself to the relief of human suffering. All through life, the prospect of snatching an hour from pressing cares for the criminal and the insane, to devote to studying in its native habitat a new plant, new seaweed, or new shellfish, or for observing anything before unseen in a Bay of Fundy tide, or a remarkable geological formation, excited in her an enthusiasm nothing could call her off from but the cry of human misery. What she might have achieved, had her indomitable energy been permanently turned in the direction of natural science, it is impossible to say. Certain it is, there would have been no crater, however deep and sulphurous, into which her courage would have shrunk from descending; no marsh, however malarious, that would have hidden from her the secret of its most secluded moss or peat-flower.

Arriving now in the actual tropics, and with all her Northern energy on the alert for fresh achievement, Miss Dix unexpectedly found herself brought face to face with a lesson in human nature, which began a modification of character in her it took years to work out. So far in life the uncompromising champion of the power of the human will to rise superior to circumstances of every kind, great was her dismay and mortification at finding herself for a time the passive victim of a purely physical environment. Before this date, indeed, stern experience had forced her to admit the indisputable fact that the lungs might become inflamed, and a sharp, burning pain transfix the side.