resulting from her whole self, from her sweet face and mouth, her eye
full of love and soul, her form and motion. I do not think she likes me
much, I have paid so much attention to Louisa and so little to herself.
Yet she is not one of those who _claim_ attention, but rather shrinks
from it. She may have faults of which I have no knowledge. But I am
charmed with everything I have seen of her.

How strange are the chance coincidences of human life! In another letter
to the same friend in New York, in which Mr. Hamlin refers in a similar
manner to Elizabeth, occur these words:

In a few weeks I hope to be in Dorset, among the Green Mountains, where
my thoughts and feelings have their centre above all places on this
earth. I wish you could be present at my wedding there on the third of
September.

How little did he dream, when penning these words, or did his friend
dream while reading them, that, after the lapse of more than forty
years, the "dear Elizabeth" would find her grave near by the old
parsonage in which that wedding was to be celebrated, while the dust of
the lovely daughter of Dorset would be sleeping on the distant shores of
the Bosphorus!


[1] For many years after the publication of his Memoir, it was so often
given to children at their baptism that at one time those who bore it,
in and out of New England, were to be numbered by hundreds, if not
thousands. "I once saw the deaths of _three_ little Edward Paysons in
one paper," wrote Mrs. Prentiss in 1832.