our friend's simple existence there. The tender beauty of the fading
year seemed a reflection of her own gracious spirit; the lovely autumn of
her life, whose golden atmosphere the frosts of sorrow and advancing age
had only clarified and brightened.

"My earliest recollection of Mrs. Child in Wayland is of a gentle face
leaning from the old stage window, smiling kindly down on the childish
figures beneath her; and from that moment her gracious motherly presence
has been closely associated with the charm of rural beauty in that
village, which until very lately has been quite apart from the line of
travel, and unspoiled by the rush and worry of our modern steam-car mode
of living.

"Mrs. Child's life in the place made, indeed, an atmosphere of its own, a
benison of peace and good-will, which was a noticeable feature to all who
were acquainted with the social feeling of the little community, refined,
as it was too, by the elevating influence of its distinguished pastor,
Dr. Sears. Many are the acts of loving kindness and maternal care which
could be chronicled of her residence there, were we permitted to do so;
and numberless are the lives that have gathered their onward impulse from
her helping hand. But it was all a confidence which she hardly betrayed
to her inmost self, and I will not recall instances which might be her
grandest eulogy. Her monument is builded in the hearts which knew her
benefactions, and it will abide with 'the power that makes for
righteousness.'

"One of the pleasantest elements of her life in Wayland was the high
regard she won from the people of the village, who, proud of her literary
attainment, valued yet more the noble womanhood of the friend who dwelt
so modestly among them. The grandeur of her exalted personal character