eyes wait in thraldom for the dawn of an eternal day, and must my
wandering feet pass through the "valley of the shadow," ere I could see
the light "around the Great White Throne?"

Through a singular complication of circumstances I was led to the home of
a sister in Chicago, from whom I had long been separated; and by equally
singular ways I was also there reunited to three of my brothers (Charles,
William and Howard). Then my veiled vision could not shut out the loved
lineaments living in the pictured halls of memory--the vision of a
love-hallowed home, and a mother's face crowning all. Scenes and faces
gone, passed like a panorama before my mind's eye, and

"So the blessed train passed by me,
But the vision was sealed upon my soul."

Through the agency of family friends I returned to my birth-place, and
with strange and mingled emotions was welcomed back to Baltimore, with
kind greetings from relatives and friends. Some had passed beyond the
portal of earthly existence, and others unexpectedly reappeared, among
whom was my father, whose face I could not see, but whose emotion
betokened great anguish at the sight of his blind daughter. Oh how many
memories must have passed through his mind, as he clasped to his heart his
chastened, motherless child, and, while other loves and other ties were
his, "the shades of friends departed" as told by Longfellow must have
entered a weird train, and amid other angel footsteps must have come--

"That being beauteous
Who unto his youth was given;
More than all things else to love him,
And is now a saint in Heaven."