God to them and their prayers.

Surely, a home inspired and ruled by such a spirit was a sweet home to
be born into!

The notices of Elizabeth's childhood depict her as a dark-eyed, delicate
little creature, of sylph-like form, reserved and shy in the presence of
strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies.
"Until I was three years old mother says I was a little angel," she once
wrote to a friend. Her constitution was feeble, and she inherited from
her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "I never knew what it
was to feel well," she wrote in 1840. Severe pain in the side, fainting
turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less,
from infancy. She had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick
to catch its varying aspects of light and beauty, whether on land
or sea. The ships and wharves not far from her father's house, the
observatory and fort on the hill overlooking Casco Bay, the White
Mountains far away in the distance, Deering's oaks, the rope-walk, and
the ancient burying-ground--these and other familiar objects of "the
dear old town," commemorated by Longfellow in his poem entitled "My Lost
Youth," were indelibly fixed in her memory and followed her wherever she
went, to the end of her days. In her movements she was light-footed,
venturesome to rashness, and at times wild with fun and frolic. Her
whole being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things
painful stamped themselves upon it as with the point of a diamond.
Whatever she did, whatever she felt, she felt and did as for her life.
Allusion has been made to the intensity of her sympathies. The sight or
tale of suffering would set her in a tremor of excitement; and in her
eagerness to give relief she seemed ready for any sacrifice, however
great. This trait arrested the observant eye of her father, and he