Of the young teacher, alone in the world, who, when calamity came to two married friends (a burnt house and office, and desperate illness) took _all_ the savings that were to have gone for three years’ special training, went to them, a three-days’ railroad journey, brought them home, and bore all the household expenses of the young couple, and of their baby’s coming, until new work was found.
The cooking and housework for four persons, (together with a heavy amount of neighborhood work,) would seem enough for even a very capable and kind pair of hands. Well, one friend, in addition to this, for two years cooked and carried in _all_ the meals for a neighbor (a good many doors away), a crippled girl, a prey, heretofore, to torturing dyspepsia. There was no chance of saving the girl’s life, she had a fatal complaint, but thanks to this simple ministry, her last two years were free from pain, and she was as happy a creature as could well be.
These and like cases crowd to one’s mind, till the memories of the town ring like a chime of bells.
I remember how troubled we were about one neighbor, a gentle, sweet lady, left the last of a large and affectionate family circle; how we dreaded the loneliness for her. We need not have been troubled. There was a place for her at every hearth in the neighborhood, and when the long last illness set in, kind, pitiful hands of neighbors were close about, soothing and tending her. One younger friend, like a daughter, never left her, day after day. Her own people were all gone before her, her harvest was gathered, there could be no more anguish of parting; and her last years seemed, as one might say, carried forward on a sunny river of friendship.
People from sunnier climates speak sometimes of our lack of community cheer and of festivals; but a temperature of twenty below zero—or even twenty above—does not conduce to dancing on the green; and it may be that the spirit’s light-footedness, like that of the outward person, is hampered by many wrappings. Yet once in a while even we northern people do “break out”; as on Fourth of July, when, in the early morning, the “Antiques and Horribles,” masked and painted, ride, grinning, through the streets.