and often ferociously savage little Englishman, training him to be
what he is not, or harder task still, to be not what he is. Having,
by dint of much pains and many prayers, obtained, as you hope, some
beginnings of victory over the most wayward of wills, and the most
unaccountably strange of mixed natures, with its intellectual
sharpness and moral bluntness, its precocious knowingness and
stereotyped childishness, its quickness to learn and slowness to
unlearn, prepare for the next stage of your enterprise. Lay out your
scheme of emigration, get the money where you can, that is to say,
call it flown from heaven and wile it out of earthly pockets,
anticipate all possible emergencies and wants by land and sea, finish
for the time the much epistolary correspondence to which this same
fragment of humanity has given rise, tempt the deep with your
restless charge, bear the discomforts of the stormiest of seas, and
inwardly groan at the signs of other and worse tempests ready ever to
burst forth in the Atlantic of that young sinner's future course; and
when after many weeks of anxious thought, fatiguing travel, and
laborious inquiry you find a home for the child, fold your hands,
give thanks and say, "What an adventure! What a toil! But now at
length it is finished!" And yet perhaps it is not half finished.

Multiply all this thought and feeling, all this labour and prayer a
thousandfold; and imagine the work of a woman as tenderly attached to
home and its peaceful ways as any one of her sisters in the three
kingdoms, who has made some twenty-eight voyages across the Atlantic
"all for love and nothing for reward;" has, by miracles of prayerful
toil and self-denying kindness, rescued from a worse than Egyptian
bondage over three thousand waifs and strays, borne them in her
strong arms to the other side of the world, and planted them in a
good land; meanwhile, in the intervals of travel, facing the perils