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England, and she felt it her duty to go. Her father's only sister, who had been left a widow in very destitute circumstances, was still living, in a distant and obscure village of Yorkshire. This village, called Osmotherly, became the scene of those labors of our heroine which have made her so well known as the "Good Lady of Bleaburn." She went thither for three weeks, and remained three months, writing to her friends at home full accounts of the condition of things, though one would have thought her hands full enough without the pen. The prospects which opened upon her at Osmotherly are well summed up thus:—

"I find that I could not have come at a better time for doing good, or a worse for gaining spirits. My aunt's two daughters are married, and live in this village; one of them, with three children, has a husband at the point of death with a fever; his brother died yesterday of the small pox, and two of her children have the whooping cough; added to this, their whole dependence is upon their own exertions, which are entirely stopped now. ... But, worse than all, one of her (the aunt's) sons has come home in a very gloomy state of mind, and all her efforts have failed to rouse him to exertion. I hope to be more successful, for he seems willing to listen to me."

The inhabitants in general were poor and ignorant, and Mary says, "If they had a parson to write the 'Annals of the Parish,' I really think the arrival of the 'American lady' would stand as the most remarkable event in the year 1825." And well it might. Mary Pickard was nurse, pecuniary aid, and general comforter to the village during some three months of almost universal illness; watching with the sick; prescribing for them; performing the last offices for the dead; supplying the wants of the poor; directing sanitary measures which perhaps saved the total depopulation of the place through ignorance, prejudice, superstition, and poverty; and, withal, caring for the melancholy cousin beforementioned, who harassed his mother and friends by continual insanity and a disposition to self-murder. To the affectionate remonstrances of distant friends she replies, "Don't fear for me. I do not think I am going to be sick, and if I am, it will be for some good purpose. I could not regret what I have done. I could almost say, as Mr. Thacher once said, 'I had better live a

shorter life and a useful one."

Typhus and spotted fever

were the appalling diseases thus heroically and calmly faced; and of one of the sufferers, a little cousin, she says, "I lay with him after the spots came out, not knowing what it meant." Near the end of November, after she had closed the eyes of five of her relatives in Osmotherly, some friends came for her from Penrith, and carried her home with them to recruit her exhausted energies. But in less than a month, a letter from Osmotherly, informing her that her aunt was apparently dying of typhus fever, took her back once more to the scene of her labors. From thence she writes, "We two are the only beings in this little cottage; for I have sent her two sons out to sleep, as a precaution against the fever, and put a bed in the corner of the room for myself. I have no recollection of ever having had the same degree of good spirits as I have been blessed with for the last six months, 1 may say nine; and, save my longing for home, I have had no cause to wish any one thing different from what it has been. God grant I may not be tempted to great presumption. I hope my wishes are humble, though my confidence may be great." Shortly after, she was taken ill, and reduced to the last degree of weakness, but with cheerfulness wholly unimpaired. In a month, she returned once more to Penrith. Meanwhile, it is evident that what she had been doing excited no surprise among her friends at home. One of them writes, "With all these desires for your return, nobody murmurs; everybody says it is much better for you to stay. And Mrs. Bond says, when she expressed her sorrow about it to Dr. Channing, he gave her, for the first time in his life, almost an angry look!"

In June, 1827, about a year after her return home, Miss Pickard was married to the Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., then a widower, with two children. The disposition of mind in which she entered upon her new duties seems to have savored less of earth than heaven. She was one who habitually spoke of the "blessings of responsibility," instead of its burdens. She was indeed a helper to her excellent husband, whose biographer speaks of the year that followed this marriage as one of the most active and useful of his ministry. They both, in

after life, spoke of the "Eden of Sheafe Street," so lovely was the memory of this their early married home. But only a year of such happiness was allotted to them. Mr. Ware lost his health, and Mary once more found that Providence had intended her for a nurse. On the 1st of April, 1829, Mr. and Mrs. Ware sailed for Europe, with the hope that the voyage and a sojourn abroad might restore Mr. Ware's strength. A young child was to be left behind; but the wife said, "I felt I had done all poor human nature could do; the rest was in God's hands-it was all in God's hands." She said, in after years, that this was the most trying period of her life. One of her husband's most distressing symptoms was a total depression of spirits; a sense of helplessness, a fear of uselessness, agonizing to such a spirit as that of his wife, so tender, so sympathizing, so ready to take all troubles upon herself. The experiment was unsuccessful, and, after fourteen months' absence, the pair returned home, sadly, and bearing with them a young infant, born in Rome. Mrs. Ware's power of endurance was now for the time exhausted, and a long and protracted illness followed her arrival at home.

The remainder of her married life was but the conclusion of this beginning. Repeated illnesses of Mr. Ware, the birth and loss of children; labors incessant and out of measure; failing strength on the part of the devoted wife - these filled up the years till Mr. Ware died, in September, 1843. We could gladly dwell upon the beautiful submission and admirable conduct of Mary Ware in these hours of deepest woe. Perhaps one little circumstance may be taken as a key to the whole. "A Sunday intervened before the body was removed for burial, and that day Mrs Ware went, with her children, morning and afternoon, to their accustomed place of worship; desiring it for their own sacred communion, and believing it most in accordance with his feelings." Would that this holy example might sink deep into the hearts of those who allow custom and convention to warp the course of feeling and emotion from the church instead of to it, when bereavement throws the soul upon its highest resources for support and consolation! Mrs. Ware desired, too, to associate the idea of death in the minds of her children, not with restraint and

gloom, but with the place of prayer and praise, and the presence of cheerful worshippers. "It was a holy season," says one of the daughters, "those days after dear father left us; no bustle, no preparation of dress, no work done but what was absolutely necessary; it was like a continued Sabbath."

Something more than six years of life remained to Mrs. Ware in her widowed state. These were passed in straitened circumstances, and painful efforts at occupations uncongenial and wearing, particularly that of teaching, which, undertaken at that time of life, was trying in the extreme to head and heart. An insidious disease supervened, a disease involving distressing operations, and obliging her to look death in the face, till she learned to welcome his aspect as that of a friend and deliverer. Beautiful, indeed, is the picture drawn on the mind by the account of her long decline; and the close proved all that could be desired, fit cadence to a life whose movement had been governed throughout by a hidden music. She died on Good Friday, and in the calm hour of an April twilight, surrounded by friends whose countenances beamed with the glory they felt was about to be revealed to her, and holding to her loving heart her husband's precious lines, written when he once had the thought that he must die without again beholding her. His words would serve for her epitaph, if we imagine them the offering of the multitudes she had helped, comforted, and instructed : - "Dear, dear Mary; if I could, I would express all that I owe to you. You have been an unspeakable, an indescribable blessing. God reward you a thousandfold! Farewell till we meet again.”

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ART. VIII. The Life and Epistles of St. Paul. By the Rev. W. J. CONYBEARE, M. A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Rev. J. S. Howson, M. A., Principal of the Collegiate Institution, Liverpool. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans. 1852. 2 vols. 4to. pp. xvi. 492 & 573.

AMONG the hamlets and decaying villages of the Turkish

province of Karamania, Tersoos holds an almost metropolitan rank, and one of its inhabitants might still take to himself the credit of being "a citizen of no mean city." To be sure, deposits washed down from the mountain have filled up its ancient harbor, so that only wherries can approach where fleets used to ride at anchor. But the surrounding plain is inexhaustibly fertile in corn and cotton, while the mountain pastures in the rear sustain numerous herds of goats and buffaloes, whose spoils, added to the productions of the soil, create an active commerce, to the annual amount of half a million of dollars, at the nearest port on the Mediterranean.* Its houses of a single story are chiefly constructed from the ruins of the larger and more stately edifices of the ancient city. Beyond these, there are very few vestiges of its former magnificence.

But, during the first century of the Christian era, Tersoos was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, and the object of peculiar favor and munificence with successive emperors. It was the chief centre of the East for travel and commerce. The river Cydnus flowed through the town in a deep channel, two hundred feet in width, and its wharves were crowded with mariners and merchandise from every portion of the empire and its dependencies. In the diversity of its population it was a microcosm. The native "barbarian" stock was diminished and depressed, but not wholly extinct. The descendants of an early Greek colony constituted the wealthiest and most influential caste, and their language was that of the law and of general intercourse. Numerous Roman officials and mercantile residents were assuming their places by the side of the Greeks in social respectability, and above them, of course, in the municipal and provincial administration. Separated from all these by their religious faith and ancestral customs, but intimately associated with them in the various departments of active life, were large numbers of the Hebrew race, whose migratory instincts had anticipa

* Of the extent to which modern Geography is a mythological science we have a curious instance in Tersoos. Of two standard authorities now before us, one makes its population 7,000, and its port at a distance of "four hours' journey," while the other rates its population at from 25,000 to 30,000, and places its port "about seven or eight miles from the town."

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