Frontispiece, Aunt Winifred, Mary and Faith (The Gates Ajar, Illustrated Edition, Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870).

ONE WEEK; only one week to-day, this twenty-first of February.

I had been sitting here in the dark and thinking about it, till it seems so horribly long and so horribly short; it has been such a week to live through, and it is such a small part of the weeks that must be lived through, that I could think no longer, but lighted my lamp and opened my desk to find something to do.

I was tossing my paper about,— only my own: the packages in the yellow envelopes I have not been quite brave enough to open yet,— when I came across this poor little book in which I used to keep memoranda of the weather, and my lovers, when I was a school- girl. I turned the leaves, smiling to see how many blank pages were left, and took up my pen, and now I am not smiling any more.

If it had not come exactly as it did, it seems to me as if I could bear it better. They tell me that it should not have been such a shock. “Your brother had been in the army so long that you should have been prepared for anything. Everybody knows by what a hair a soldier's life is always hanging,” and a great deal more that I am afraid I have not listened to. I suppose it is all true; but that never makes it any easier.

The house feels like a prison. I walk up and down and wonder that I ever called it home. Something is the matter with the sunsets; they come and go, and I do not notice them. Something ails the voices of the children, snowballing down the street;…