JUNE. 
ESTER is beautiful as the evening star. Margaret is very 
different. It does not matter what she is as to beauty, for 
the question seems never to have entered her own mind. 
I doubt whether it has ever occurred to her whether she 
can be this, or that, or the other. She is, there s an end 
of the matter. Such pure existence, without question, 
without introspection, without hesitation or consciousness, 
I never saw in any one above eight years old. Yet she is 
wise; it becomes not me to estimate how wise. You will 
ask how I know this already. I knew it the first day I saw them; I 
knew it by her infinite simplicity, from which all selfishness is dis¬ 
charged, and into which no folly can enter. The air of heaven must 
have been above her from her infancy to nourish such health of the 
soul. 
Her affection for her sister is a sort of passion. It has some of 
the features of the serene guardianship of one from on high, but it is 
yet more like the passionate servitude — of the benefited to a bene¬ 
factor, for instance — which is, perhaps, the most graceful attitude in 
which our humanity appears. Where are the words that can tell what 
it is to witness, day by day, the course of such a life as this ? to see, 
living and moving before one’s eyes, the very spirit that one had 
caught glimpses of, wandering in the brightest vistas of one’s imagina¬ 
tion in the holiest hours of thought? Yet is there nothing fearful as 
in the presence of a spirit; there is scarcely even a sense of awe, so 
childlike is her deportment. I go, grave and longing to listen; I 
come away and find that I have been talking more than any one; 
revealing, discussing, as if I were the teacher and not the learner, you 
will say the worshipper. 
Her life has been devotedness, and will be to the end. If she 
were left the last of her race, she would spend her life in worshipping 
the unseen that lay above her, and would be as unaware of herself as 
now. 
IT Mawtttjp.att. 
