"I am afflicted, and ready to die from my youth up, while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted.Thy wrath lieth hard upon me and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me.Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into utter dark ness."Yet through it all what grateful joy in God, what expressions of living faith and devotion! During my long illness and confinement to my room, the Bible has been almost a new book to me, and I see that God has always dealt with His children as He deals with them now, and that no new thing has befallen me.All these weary days so full of languor, these nights so full of unrest, have had their appointed mission to my soul.And perhaps I have had no discipline so salutary as this forced inaction and uselessness, at a time when youth and natural energy continually cried out for room and work.
AUGUST 15.-I dragged out my drawing materials in a listless way this morning, and began to sketch the beautiful scene from my window.At first I could not feel interested.It seemed as if my hand was crippled and lost its cunning when it unloosed its grasp of little Ernest, and let him go.But I prayed, as I worked, that I might not yield to the inclination to despise and throw away the gift with which God has Himself endowed me.Mother was gratified, and said it rested her to see me act like myself once more.Ah, I have been very selfish, and have been far too much absorbed with my sorrow and my illness and my own petty struggles.
AUGUST 19.-I met to-day an old friend, Maria Kelly, who is married, it seems, and settled down in this pretty village.She asked so many questions about my little Ernest that I had to tell her the whole story of his precious life, sickness and death.I forced myself to do this quietly, and without any great demand on her sympathies.My reward for the constraint I thus put upon myself was the abrupt question:
"Haven't you grown stoical?"
I felt the angry blood rush' through my veins as it has not done in a long time.My pride was wounded to the quick, and those cruel, unjust words still rankle in my heart.This is not as it should be.I am constantly praying that my pride may be humbled, and then when it is attacked, I shrink from the pain the blow causes, and am angry with the hand that inflicts it.It is just so with two or three unkind things Martha has said to me.I can't help brooding over them and feeling stung with their injustice, even while making the most desperate struggle to rise above and forget them.It is well for our fellow-creatures that God forgives and excuses them, when we fail to do it, and I can easily fancy that poor Maria Kelly is at this moment dearer in His sight than I am who have taken fire at a chance word And I can see now, what I wonder I did not see at the time, that God was dealing very kindly and wisely with me when He made Martha overlook my good qualities, of which I suppose I have some, as everybody else has, and call out all my bad ones, since the axe was thus laid at the root of self-love.And it is plain that self-love cannot die without a fearful struggle.
