The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-05-09

proved so much in my health since have been here. am glad am better, and not so thin and ugly and such yell low black color as I was want to live SO that l can be with Edward always. We do not read any of the books we brought we do nothing but climb the hills and lie under the trees and watch the clouds. think 1 must low; Edward. do not sec any difference in myself only aunt says am no longer ths home Hest girl she ever saw, and am happy all the time, and do not dream at night. | wonder if Edward loves me? He says he does. ask him how he knows: if he has ever told anyone before. He says he has not, but he is sure he loves me. He is unhappy because I will not say love him. How can when l have never loved anyone that know of, and cannot be sure know what love is ? wonder if it is love to always be happy with just one person, and to want to be with him
 September 3o.-We have stayed here too long, for Edwards good at least. He is not well. He has some kind of low fever. the physician says. We go back in few days. wish we could all stay here, and Edward could be well, and that we could have home here and never go pack to town at all can see now that
 was never happy in my life until the present time. Aunt says have grown to be woman since we came up here, the last day of June, it was, think. How strange it seems to me that ever read all the time as did! have not spent one hour in reading in the last three months. wonder if do really love Ed ward? It does not seem to me as if this could be the master passion thought it was something different do not know what. thought i. was something great and strange, and that could not help knowing when loved. I do not seem to have changed at all, but other things have changed. Everything makes me happy. It made me SO happy this morn- ing just to hear the robin singing that l felt as if l wanted to cry. wonder how it feels to cry3 Sometime when l am with Edward, with his hand in mine, 1 am so happy, so contented, that feel that 1 must cry. 1 wonder if l do cry only don't shed tears? find 90 many new things this summer and thought l knew everything before. did know everything in my fathers books, and he often told me those books had everything that ever come te the knowledge of man in them. wonder if those old riddles mean anything? don't care, l am sure. don't think l will ever read another book. Aunty Baxter is calling mel Edward wants me.
 December 25 70, if I could only know what this day means Is it a silly memory of weak fable, or is it really and truly kept in memory of Gods great tenderness for the sorrowful? Since Ed ward died l have had but one thought. Not to die myself, as expected to desire, but strange wish to know God, to feel that could rest in His love and mercy. Why was Edward taken from me when life was so perfectly beautiful and happy to both of us3 Those fatal, dear sum- mer days in the hillsl How little we thought that instead of a long and heavenly life on earth beginning, we were digging my Edwards grave! O, if Il could know these bells that ring SO sweelly were truly calling me to rest in Gods peacel do not harden my heart God must be good, and we must be his creatures: O, Edward, my poor, dead darlingw
 "Did Agnes ever mention Edward Baxter to you, Dr. Arndt ?" asked George, as paused at the close of Agnes Christ mas entry in her journal.
 No; she never spoke to me ce he, past or any part of her family history. All of her conversation with me, of a confidential nature, referred to you, or to her love for you"
 "Poor Agnes" said George. "She must have suffered more, far more, than even we can guess. How tender, how beautiful, and how noble she wasl She must have had feeling that her ancestry was unfortunate. She never referred to her family in our conversation at all. Of course, l knew something of the family history by common report, and she spoke to me ouce of her girlish fond ness for her cousin who died before she was sixteen. know absolutely nothing of her life up to the time first met her.n
 "lt was life of the intellect solely, I think" said l. "Her journals are very full from the time of her thirteenth year, but they contain hardly anything beside her reflections upon her reading and her uiSutoAlCS OI uCI IdtuSf. mere IS not single reference to her mother in the whole"
 "Her mother died when she was an infant" said George; that is all I know of her except that she was very beautiful, a soft, dark, tender face. Agnes showed me miniature on ivory which her father always wore while he lived. He seems to have shut himself up with his books and his daughter after his wife died, and to have taken no heed of the world to the day of his death"
 "Did he kill himselfp'
 "l do not know. believe now that he did. He was a mystic in his beliefs, and lived in the past and the remote future the present was barren waste to him in his later life."
 "I had supposed his belief thoroughly uaterialistic," said I. "Agnes certainly seems to have had strong tendencies in that direction, which were fortified by a very wide course of authors who do not a(HAnf atsnn rI ,,-S .l