wings and crows over the North, it is glad enough to get its teachers
there, and ministers too, and treats them very well when it gets
them, into the bargain. We have in the school about one hundred and
twenty-five pupils of all ages. I never knew till I came here the
influence which early religious education exerts upon the whole future
age. There is such a wonderful difference between most of these young
people and those in the North, that you might almost believe them
another race of beings. Mrs. Persico is beautiful, intelligent,
interesting, and pious. Mr. Persico is just as much like John Neal as
difference of education and of circumstances can permit. Mr. N.'s strong
sense of justice, his enthusiasm, his fun and wit, his independence and
self-esteem, his tastes, too, as far as I know them, all exist in like
degree in Mr. Persico.

The early spring, with its profusion of flowers of every hue, so far in
advance of the spring in her native State, gave her the utmost pleasure;
but as the summer approached, her health began to suffer. The heat was
very intense, and hot weather always affected her unhappily. "I feel,"
she wrote, "as if I were in an oven with hot melted lead poured over my
brain." Her old trouble, too--"organic disease of the heart" it was now
suspected to be--caused her much discomfort. "While writing," she says
in one of her letters, "I am suffering excruciating pain; I can't call
it anything else." Her physical condition naturally affected more or
less her religious feelings. Under date of July 12th, she writes:

The word _conflict_ expresses better than any other my general state
from day to day. I have seemed of late like a straw floating upon the
surface of a great ocean, blown hither and thither by every wind, and
tossed from wave to wave without the rest of a moment. It was a mistake
of mine to imagine that God ever intended man to rest in this world. I