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PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
B Y
MRS. iA. D. T. WXHITNEY,
AUTHOR OF "FAITH GAIRTNEY'S GIRLHOOD,"  THlE GAYWORTHYS," ETC., ETC,
LORI   NGI -, Publisher,
319 WASIIINGTON  STREIETS
BOSTON.'s B 9




Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
MRS. A. D. T'. WHITNEY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
ROCKWVELL & ROLLINS, STEEEOTYPERS AND PRINTERS,
122 Washington Street, Boston.




CONTENTS.
CHAPTER                                             PACGE
I. —INTO TILE BY-GONES........  7
II. - STILLNESS AND STITCHES.                    18
III. —THE COMIINGS-IN e.     
IV.- TiHE LIFE AND TIHE GLORY......  41
V.- INTO THE MEANINGS..     54
VI. —INTO THE OLD AND THE NEW  - a..             67
VII.-" FORZINO"....      o 79
VIII. - INTO DARK CLOSETS AND NEIGHBOR-HOUSES.       92
IX. - INTO THE MIDDLES.  O. e.105
X. —INTO THE SUNSHINE...      113
XI. -INTO THE SHOPS....... 122
XII. - INTO THE YEARS..133
V




VI                       CONTENTS.
CIHAPTER                                                   PAGE
XIII. - INTO THE NEW TESTAMENT PART OF IT... 143
XIV.o-INTO GOD'S TREASURE-BOX  e...     157
XV.- INTO THE FAIRY STORY..  o..      168
XVI. — WITH THE SUNDAY STRAYS... 180
XVII. - INTO OTHER PEOPLE'S BUSINESS.. 193
XVIII.- INTO THE 3IIDNIGHT.  O,..... 208
XIX.- INTO THE DAY-GLEAM..  a... e        209
XX. - INTO THE MORNING.....         221




PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
INTO THE BY-GONES.' ELIPI-IALlET'S folks are going to Europe."
3Mother says that in a meek kind of way, trying not
to be too much set up about it, to the neighbors when
they come in, and ask, as the ~neighbors here have a
way of doing, "' What the good word is with us?"
It makes me think -- that greeting, - always. It
seems, somehow, as if it were a sweet old fashion that
mighlt have come down out of the kingdom of heaven.
That syllable is so full, -    wordcl"   That which'" was in the beginning with God," and " without which
nothing was made that is made."  What he has been
giving out, always, - down, through the angels, unto
men, and into things.  God's meanings, of thought
and of life; his instant bestowal.
7




8        PATIENCE STROING'S OUTINGS.
Looking at it so, it is tender and solemn to hear the
neighbors ask, " What the good word is to-day?"
And to hear mother say, with that kind of tremble in
her voice that she tries to straighten into calmness,
"Eliplialet's' folks are going to Europe," - why, it is
as if the leave for the pleasure was just the day's
word from God.
I know mother is glad and proud at Eliphalet's welldoing and getting-on.  She is a little afraid of his
wife, because she belongs to a Boston family of consequence, and is very elegant in her mannei's, and
never takes them  off, not even for the most common
every-clay. But then, as mother says, she isn't'" stuckup," because she never got up, and she never comes
down. She was always just so. She is very respectful and kind to mother, but she don't like to be introduced as " Eliphalet's wife."  She is' my dlaughlterin-law, Mrs. Strong."  Not even "i Mrs. Eliphalet"
since father died, though she was particular about that
before. She never objected nor suggested in so many
words; but we always find out, somehow, just what
Gertrude considers proper, and likes to be done. She




INTO THE BY-GONEVS.               9
is "Gertrude" amnong us. _Mother wouldn't like it
otherwise; and muother has her quiet proprieties too.
Well, Eliphalet's folks are going to Europe. HEe and
Gertrude, and the children, alnd their nurse, and their
Aunt M1arthe.  (That is not a Yankee shortening;
the French terminal makes all the difference in the
prettiness. It is just so with other words. I remember that I would not call my white waists,gamnps,"
thinking of bed-gowns and Sairey; but when I found
out that it was the French "' guimpe," it gave a grace
to the name and the tlling. I don't know why we
shouldn't be graceful, even if we have to be French.)
Everybody goes to Europe now. I think it is to get
rid of the kitchens. There are two currents in the Atlantic, - an upper and a lower. The tide comes in
at our basement stories, and has to flow out again
at the parlor and front doors. Perhaps that is thd
reason the Gulf Stream  is changing. Things have
to equalize and accommodate.
Eliphalet came out last Sunday evening on horseback and took tea, and told mother all about it. They
are to stay a year or more; travel in England and




10       PATIENCE STRONV&'S 0 UTIVNGS.
Scotland, and Switzerland this summer, and then go
to Italy for the winter, and, in the spring come to
Paris; home when they get ready. HI-ow much that
is, to do and to see! I wondnlc  if those little children
will take in anything', out of it all, to keep.
" Pashie, you ought to go too. You don't get many
outings."
Eliphalet said that just as he went off, when I was
bidding him good-by, standing on the door-step, i)atting his horse's nose, and giving him mouthifuls of
firesh clover out of my hand.
Don't I have many outings?
It has been in my head ever since. I don't think
Eliphalet knows. It depends upon how far you go out
when your gate's ajar. Everybody's little yardl-room
opens into all out-doors.
Why it seems to me that life is all outings. When
you don't go out any longer, you die. There's no
sutch thing as shutting people up.
Mother and I have lived here, all by ourselves, for
ten years. Before that, we had father to take care of
for five years, from the time le first had paralysis.




INTO TIlE BY-GO0NES.       1       t
And before that it was AuLnt Judith, and she was dleaf,
and dreadfully, - well, unexpected in her ways. I'm
thirty-eight now, and mother's fifty-six.  M3Iy dear, little, young-old m6ther! I am her oldest.  So near her!
I am so glad. NWe're such comforts to each other.
Why I've all her life to go out into, in the first
place.  Ever since she used to tell me stories atbout
" when she was little," and,G when she was young."
She keeps that dear, simple way of speaking that
she learned when she was " little," and when she was
"young," from her mother and the old-time friends.
And yet she has gone on with the years, to take in
and  enjoy what the years teach.  She knows new
books, and new thoughts, and the light of to-day on
old things shines for her as truly as for any one. We
talk over the philosophers together, she and I; and we
love the grand speculations that take in the ideas of
a humanity hundreds of thousands of years old, and
the earths buried within the earth; its coarse, wild,
rudimentary, seething, passionate Past, rank and slimy
and ravelous with wilderness and reptile and beast,
covered up and softened over, and changed; greened




12       PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
and beautified, and peopled with fairer and fairer life,
telling us, in a Word as big as the world, of how it
shall be with men's souls in the long time and patience
that God is rich in.
She loves all this, but she does not trouble about
new  phrases and pronunciations in her every-day
speech. She says " our folks"- (kindly old AngloSaxon) - where Gertrude would say " our family," or
m'  y father's family; " and she speaks of when she was
" little," so that it makes you feel tender toward the
little child that she was, and that somewhere in her nature she has not yet ceased to be. She " suffers the little child " in herself, and is in nowise ashamed of it,
andcl by it she does always behold the Father's face. My
dear, little, young-old mother! That is the heart-word
I always have for her, and that is how I call her.
There were so many of them, sisters, once; and her
life takes me back into all their lives. Now, there are
only mother and Aunt Hetty MIaria.
Aunt Hetty Maria married the two largest and oldest farms in Dearwood together; and her husband has
been a merlber of Congress, and she lives at the old




INTO THE B Y-GON'ES.              13
homestead, and is a great deal thought of and looked
up to. She always wears black silk in the afternoons;
and when people come to see her they put on their
best, in gowns and in behavior; and her tea-table is
always ready for company, and set with real china, that
you can see through. Somebody almost always does
come in to tea in the summer time, and so her house
is " society." for Dearwood.  To take tea at 3Mladam
Parmenter's is to take the best thing at once, and the
freedom of all there is. The ministers always go there,
and the lecturers, and people that have any public
business, and those who have fiiends staying with
them.
It is very quiet and oldl-fashioned and dignified
there now. It has got the air that only ripens with a
hundred years' living. But those are the rooms they
were born and grew up in, and were married out of,those who were married; buried out of, — those who
died; and there was where the young folks had their
tea-dclrinlings and their courtings, and their housefuls
of fiiends at Thanksgivings and holiday-times; and
their garden and orchard walls and talkls when the




14       PATIEGCE STROVNG'TS OUTINATS.
damask roses were in bloom or the peaches were ripe;
and their moonlight sittings under the great trees at
the wide firont door.
I have all that when I go to Dearwood.  It is all
there; and that is one of my outings.  Many avenued,
into the lives that have been partly told me, and that
hlave partly told themselves.  I never stand at the
landing half-way up the broadl, shallow-stepped staircase, but I seem to feel how it was when they and their
visitors went up to bed in the old times; wheni- they
stood there with shining  candlesticks in their hands,
ald called up and clown to each other in the last talk
and laugh of the night, which is always the brightest
and most beguiling.  Nobody ever said a word about
that;  but I know it by what they would call, nowadays, psychometry, I suppose.
Aunt IHetty 3aria's picture h1angs in the parlor. It's
a picture of gowin and great white ruffled cape, mostly; the features are of little account, and were never
thought to look much like her. But I like it for the
very gown ancl  cape, such as they don't wear now
even in their dreams.  Such things grow queer in a




INTO TIHE BY-GONES.             15
portrait for a while, and then they grow ancient and
graphic. Then they tell stories, and are as much as a
face. TLhey become the things that pLortray.
It makes me think of warm, pleasant weather, and
company coming, that picture, with the low-necked
silk gown, and the wide, clear, fresh muslin cape, with
the ruffles standing' off at the shoulders, and the hair
done up in high, smooth bows. It wouldn't have been
a dress to play croquet, or Aunt Sally, or ship-coil in;
but to talk, and walk, and gather roses, and sit in
state in the best parlor for a hancld-round tea; and so,
when I stand and look at it, it takes ime right back to
itself and into its day.
Why, there are plenty of ways to get ozt! Away
out into the long-lived years, with people one never
saw or knew. An old house, an old picture, a word
in a book can do it. One needn't necessarily cross
the water. If one does, it is to get precisely similar
things. More of them, perhaps, and on a grander
scale; but I think these help me to know what those
would be. And if you really do know what a thing
woutld be, I think you hlardly ever get it. Because it is




16       PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
the meanings of life, and not so much living itself,
that God has for us here.
I do not believe I shall ever go to Europe.
A journey isn't always an " outing," after all. People go journeys and never go out the least bit. They
just pack themselves up, and first they are here, and:then they are there.; and that is all the difference, especially in these times of railroads, and day and night
travel. VWhy, Europe was only a bigger Washington
Street to Effie Butler, Gertrude's cousin.  She went
away in four trunks, and she came back in eight, that
was all. Shops and dress-makers in Paris, and jewellers in Rome and Florence. To what she had,l more
was given. But she never went out.
Perhaps it is only what goes out and stays out, that
counts in our living. That is God's going out. A
reaching which is growing, and a giving which shares
and multiplies life.  That was Christ's out-going'.
" Virtue went out of him."  Blessing and help, of a
kind that "6 goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."
He himself "I came out from God " and into the world.
It tells everything, that little Saxon syllable of




I~NT O TlE B3Y-GONES.              17
force: how  God gave forth his creation; how the.
suns flun1g off their planets into the spaces;  what
human living really means, and the circles that lives
make in time.
I should like to think up, thorolughly, what my
"outings " have been, and what they mioght be.
People keep diaries of their travels: I wonder what
a diary of these would be?
2




18       PATIENVCE STROlNG'S OUTfIVGS.
II.
STILLNESS AND STITCHES.
SIT still, and everything will come rouncl to you.
It wouldn't be quite safe to carry that into all sorts of
things; but it is very true of a still life. It is true.
and comfortable, also, of many a quiet pause in the
midst of perplexity.  Did you ever lose a compailion
in a crowded street, or miss an. appointment at some
shop or corner?  And didn't you find out that the best
thing to be d(one, perhaps, was to stand still till your
friend, in the rush hither and thither in which you had
both been striving to meet, caine by?  Only, indeed,
if both had been equally wise you might possibly have
both stood fast until to-day. - But when you can't
move, it is a contenting theory, and it works well.
Fashion's come round, even to red hair. Put away
any old thing, and, if the moths don't eat it up, it will
turn to purpose some day.  "Lay it by for seven




STILLNESS AND S'TITCHES.            19
years, and then turn it and lay it by for seven more,"
and, if you don't forget you ever had it, there'll be a
wgant for it. I'd rather use up as I go along, for myself or somebody else; but the rule stands good
ag'Linst burning up or throwing away.
Sometimes I think that still people, like us, get
mnost. The world drifts on, and round and round, and
something is always touching at one's corner, giving
one a glimpse, and in the stillness one can take in a
good deal that the people in the hurry can't stop to
think of.
Now Eliphalet and Gertrude are gOing to Europe.
And they are full of plans and talk; and they come
out here with them. Eliphalet brings his guide-books
and gets out the big maps, and tells us all the here and
the there of it, and the what and the -why; and then
haven't we got it all, mother and I, - without the
trunks, and the dress-makers, and the sewing and the
packing, and the sea-sickness and the crowd, and the
care about money, and the care about one's self, - the
troublesome self that never seems to be in the way
when it's where it belongs, but that, the minute you set




29       PAI T1ENCE STRNS0_Y'S 0   OU TIN'S.
off anywhere, you've got always to take with you and
to tend?  You see, when you travel, you must keep
taking out and putting away —your clothes and your
body- all the time; in and out of boxes- in and out
of boats and cars and hotels. If your sight and your
thought could go, without all this!
They do when your friends travel for you. When
you've found out exactly what there is to go for, as
you only do find out when somebody is really going -
why, then you've almost been. And when the letters
come back, you're as good as there.
Not but whvat the doing does deepen it all. It is
like putting any other dream into action. You can
dream in a minlute; but it takes days and years to live
your dream out; and if you can live it, you haven't
made it your own until you do. It is only that the
minutes are given to them who are forbidden the days
and the years; and in the Lord's giving he can make
the days as the years, and the minutes as the days.
And so things come by, and you get your share, and
the bit is multiplied. When the people were hungry,
I-1e made them sit down quietly on thie green grass.




ST'ILLNESS AND STIT'CIIES.           21
(There is always "' mnuch grass "- much possible green
content - in every place.)  And I-e gave to the few,
and the few to the many; and there was enough for
al.
I think, after the studying alnd planning are done
which are the first and the essence of the having, the
next best mnust be the between-timnes.  Quiet hours
on the ocean, when you know you are on your way;
and over and over, ripening anid gladdening in your
mind, come the plans and the visions, and the feeling
of what is going to be: the stretches of railway between one delight and the next; the time you hacve
to take to get the body alonlg, when what has been
grows mellow in the mind, enriching and sweetening
it; and what is coming comes beforehand, with a long,
beautiful slant, as the dayshine does over the hills.
Yes, it is all best. And I know I should be glad to
go, and live it in. But I can stay and be glad, too, for
the much of it that I can get without the going, and
that this quiet sta;ilng works with, also, like those
between-times of the going. Think it over as I will,
it somehow conmes out even.




22       PATIENCE STBOYG'S OUTINGS.
I believe I like waiting times. Perhaps it is because
I have got used to waiting. But I like the days between the knowing and the having of a pleasure. It
is with you all the while. I like to expect a letter.
When it has comee there is the end of it. I like the
time when the carpet is swept, and the fire is bright, or
the windows open to the sunshine, and the flowers are
in the vases, and the fresh covers on, and the cakebasket ready in the closet, and the friend expected
presently. If she came right in, in a hurry, as soon
as the last thing was done, it would take away half
the pleasantness. And in this I feel faintly as if it
were not all; as if there might be a meaning of something deeper and farther on. I wonder if I could not
wait with some such peace as this, if I were old, or
had a long and mortal sickness, or were left alone —
awhile?  Letting the sunlight of heaven come slanting
in, slowly, long beforehand, when the clay was sure to
be?  Ml/aking a sweet pause of patience, rather than a
craving and a pain, of the taking away that wTas for
such a giving again?  I do not know; but I think it is
what this pleasantness of waiting means.




STILLNESS AND STITCIES.            23
I was very wise, and strolng' and contented, - wasn't
I?  Where is it all gone, and why couldn't I stay just
as quietly now?
Oh, but-it's very different now!
Eliphalet has asked me — truly and in earnest — to
go to Europe with them!
To put myself away, and take myself out —yes,
well, I think I can!
To have it all, - to mean it really when we talk, -
to have the rest and the hope on the sea, and the great,
beautiful, -actual things when we come to them, and
the going back in the pauses and the stillness; and the
waiting for more; to keep gathering in and laying by,
and to come home again rich for all the rest of the years!
But then, my darling little mother!
She says, " Go, dearie;" and she will stay with
Aunt r-etty Maria; she never will have a chance
again, maybe. And the home here can be shut up.
She means Inever may have the chance again. But,
then, couldn't I take it partly for her? Couldn't I keep
giving it to her as I went along, and bring it all back




24       PA TIENGCE STRONG'S 0 UTINVGS.
to be glad over together?  Nobody else would write to
her as I would -every little bit. Why, I should be
like HIarriet Byron, who always puzzled me so, how
she ever managed to have the things happen when she
was doing such monstrous days' works to write them
all down.
If I go, - and I shall keep saying "' if" till I'm on
the deck of the steamer, for I can't look it quite
straight in the face that I'm  going away froml mother
so long, or bear to put it certain in words, - if I go, I
must be ready by the fifteenth. What is to become of
my waiting-time? Am I to rush right into this great
pleasure without a breath, when I like so to stop and
look even at a little one? We shall see. I'll work
hard but we will have a quiet Sunday and lMonday
before I go to New York on Tuesday.
VWe shall start together, mother and I, -that's a
comfort. I couldn't leave her behind, standing alone
on the porch. And when she gets out of the cars at
Dearwood, there won't be any time, as Eliphalet sayss
for a fuss. Sometihnes a hurry is the best thing. I
am glad there are quiets and hurries. There always




STILLNESS AND STITCGHES.            25
are two things. Thile world is all opposites; and one
thing couldn't be without the other. You can't rest
until you're tired; you can't be glad if you've never
been sorry. We shall find it all out by-and-by; and
how He sees that everything is good.
We haven't any sewing-machine to hurry with. We
never wanted one.  I think sewing-machines are to
needle-work just what railroads are to travelling, and
telegraphs to business. You have to do ten times as
much of it, and you can't stop to enjoy it. It seems
to me that the way the world grows is very much like
the game of " bezique " they used to play at Gertrude's.
It sounds bigger to count by hundreds and thousands
than by tens; but it is precisely the same thing, after
all, as to the game, and a great deal more bother. In
fact, when we once began to change our proportions,
we spoiled the whole thing and got tired of it altogether.
If people would only dress themselves and furnish
their houses as simply as they did before, the machines
would have cleared up such a blessed space in lifeI
But they went right to inventing and multiplying tucks




26       PATIEN~CE STPONVG'S OUTIVNGS.
and bands and rufflings and flouncings, and things to
put thelni on to, till the only difference is that they are
whizzed to death with work, instead of quietly and
peaceably tired out.
No; mother and I have each her window, — hers
looks out into a larch and mine into a chestnut; her
tree is tender first with new green firinge and bright
with young, red, budding  cones; and mine grows befautiful later with its white, feathery spires; and  we
lhave each a round, old-fashioned  lighlltstanc, with a
work-basket, and a sewing-bird screwed on*; acnd the
real birds flutter up  the green  stairways of the
branches, and sit singing on the rocking tips of the
twigs; ancld we are still and happy, aslnd harve our
brains to ourselves, andl rest all our bodies except our
fingers, instead of keeping head and hands and feet
and nerves all lflying, as the children do in " My
mother sends me to you, sir."  We have our thoughts,
and our talk, and we feel the tllreads go in and out,
Ancld the satisfaction of every stitch as we make it.
They are  telegraph  lines for us women, -  these
threads, -reaching far away into times past and times




STILLNESS AND STITCHES.             27
to come, and things unseen.  We put oui lives together, bit by bit, at other whiles, like patch-work, and
then we sit down and quilt it in. I think Eve sewed
the fig-leaves together for the sewing's sake, and for
the beauty of the green tapestry-work, before ever the
devil put it into her head about the aprons. M'en can't
(o0 anything but smoke, - or whittle.
Mother's life and mine are quilted all together so.
I don't think anything ever could separate us now, or
that one of us could have a thing and the other not.
Mother's going to Europe as much as I am.
"'I can't help lotting on it all the time," she says,
out of her window, over her lapful of nightgown.
"And the lotting is the whole of it," I answer back,
over mine.
That's what the Yankee word conmes fronm. Things
are only what we " allot" to them. And the heart and
soul do that; and it takes a very little thread dropped
into the wonderful life solution, to gather in heaps the
lovely, shining crystals, each to its own. And the
stiller you keep, the more crystals you get. Which is
exactly what I began with.




28     rPATIENCE STiBOiYG'S OUTINGS.
IIL
THE COMINGS-IN.
I DON'T know which are the most, or the best, -- the
outings or the in-tings. There, - I thought before I
wrote it down, that I had made a word! And after
all, I've only come round to an old meaning. "I n't"
-" hint" - " inting,"-   inkling," - they are all the
same, and mean just this very thing. That which
comes in to us, —faintly, shadowly, breathly, -we
can't tell how.
I'll look it out in Worcester. " Etymology uncertain."  Well, I've found it out then.  Please put
Patience Strong as an authority in the next dictionary.
When I was a little girl, this house had a piece built
on to it. All one summer there was an unfinished
room, under the piazza, just boarded in; and once,
when two or three uncles and aunts were here with




TIHE CO3MIINGS-lV.              29
their children, and every place was full, I slept there.
In the clear, shiny mornings, when I woke up, there
was a little beam of light that came from the east, all
the way from the great sun, straight clown upon the
world, striking nothing until it touched an old elm-tree
in our yard, and then streamed through a little knothole into my chamber. There it made a picture on the
opposite wall, - a soft gray picture of moving leaves
and stems; only a bit of a branch, magnified, I suppose, according to the law of optics for things given
through little glory-holes into camera-obscuras, - but
bringing the whole tree in to me, for all that; the tree,
and the wind also in its boughs, and the freshness
of the growing, moving morning-time. All this came
in-to me with a shadow - a hint; —to  me, shut up
there, with only a little knot-hole as big as my finger
for a window! And that is the way things do come;
as nmuch as to say, like the old song,   6 If you want
any more, can't you sing it yourself?"
Things come back so; books, for instance; stories
I have read, and feelings they have given me. Sometimes it isn't any one in particular, but a sudden sense




O0        P ATIENCE STDIO0_V'S O UTINGS.
of them in general; a kind of IEolian stir of strings
in me that have been touched with pleasantniess
Somebody showed me a spectroscope the other day.
I went to see a friend who has the whole of most
things; and yet she, too, must come to the border,
beyond which she has to live by hints; she showed
me, and told me about it: how the colors were all
measured off with wonderful lines, and each kind of
light produced its own, -just so much in breadth, and
in just'such place in the prismn; how the light of the
sun divided itself, and the light of Sirius showed its,
kindred with ours; how  they found out by fusing
metals, and seeing where their colors ranged thernmSelves, just what must be also in the blaze of the faroff stars, and that their glory  ncd our own is all of
one.  She burned a little salt in a candle, and straight
and swift leaped up in the prism  along the yellow, in
Sodium's line, a vivid thread, thrilled instantly to its
own place: the law of all reception, of all illumination, of all life.
Well, it comes so in sudden streaks and flashes,
each in its own home-place in the hecart, the mnimoiy




THE COMINTG S-IN.               31
of wrhat, one has gathered, and entered into and been.
Through   books, or places, or people, or thoughts. I
never know why; but in the midst of work this breath
comes over me, and in it is a spirit-firagrance that
touches sense; a momentary realizing of all remnembrances, imaginings, and hopes, showing how true they
are, and how, once had, they are never to be lost out,
or, once looked for, they are sure to be.
That is why I like to live on in this dear old home,
and why I should hate to have even the carpets wear
wholly out and be replaced all together; it is why a
fire, I think, is such a terrible thing; it is why I can
never understand how peopdle can like to send off to
auctions, and new-furnish their homes. Why, when
theydclo that, they haven't any homes. I like to have
things kept and cared for, and turnedl, and macde to
last; and, when they must go, to have the complexion
and expression of them renewed in something as nearly
like as possible. I should not like to have our sittingroom  annihilated and supplanted by the carpets and
wall paper being changed to as startling a difference as
couldl be, any more than I should like next spring to




32       PATIENCE 6STBOVNG'S O UTIT&rS.
have all the trees leave out in royal purple, or the sky
turn green. God keeps the home-feeling in his earth
for us; I believe he will keep it, too, in his heaven.
Things must wear out and change; but the spirit and
the sense nay last.  T' They shall pass away; but thy
word shall not pass away."
The sitting-room and parlor carpet were both alike
once. Then the sitting-room carpet wore out, and the
parlor one was put in the place of it; and one that
wouldn't look badly with it was got for the parlor;
and so by little and little we shaded off our wontedness from one into the other; and now I suppose we
might take away the first and replace it with this last
again, and have still another new one, not too different, without the feeling of a break. But, now there
are only two of us, they will last'as they are, I think,
all our lives. I hope they will. But then I am an old
maid.
I like that sitting-room  carpet so much! With its
great, old-fashioned ovals of shaded browns, and its
intermediate lesser figures filling up with curving lines
and leaves just touched with deep relief of green, —




TITE COL3NII  S-IN.            b3
good, fast, old colors that stand wear and sunshine,
and that I remember so many sunshiny days by!
I remember a winter morning, when grandmcia was
alive, and lived with us, when I was a girl of twelve,
and sat in the scuth window reading  Irving, out of a
great volume of all his works, that father had bought
at a sale, - delighting in Bracebridge IHall, and hardly
knowing' which was most enchanting and to be coveted, the " fair Julia's" life in her English home, or
that of the beautiful Mioorish princesses in the Alhambra.  I remember the sun pouring broad and full
across my lap and the page, and lying level along the
greens and browns away out into the open parlor door,
and grandma saying, "The sun lays straight, —-it's
twelve o'clock."  All the cosiness of imy book, and her
quiet companionship, and her knitting-work, - she
was footing socks for father, - and the bright day;
even the yellow gingerbread mother gave me for my
luncheon, - come back to me, bringing aftler them the
joy and freedom and fancy of twelve years old, when
life was only a Sketch Book, as often as the'" sun lays
straight" along the seams. And then I look forward
3




34       PATIEN~CE STWOANG'S OUT1AGbS.
as well as back, - for the soul is the "~ living thing full
of eyes before and behind," - and. think of the time
that is to come, the time that the dear, kind, simple
grandmlother has entered into, when there shall be no
more measuring of the noonday or of the goinDg down,
because there shall be no more need of the sun itself,
but we shall dwell in the midst of the unmeasured and(
shadowless light of God.
I do not suppose anybody could have had just such
a home as this, anywhere else.
In the first place, there is the old, old garden. It
seenzs as if it must have always been old. There are
flowers there that don't grow in new gardens; at least,
not in the same way; and that now you couldn't hinler
growing if you would. There is a great round patch
of ladies' delights under ain oak tree, that looks as if
it had been carpetedl; and they come up there as if
they were only wild violets, and open their golden
and purple eyes, and make little short-stemmed nods
in the wind till they seem like a cloud of but;terfiies
just lighllting  andi settling, or liftilg themselves to fly
away. Andc down in the deep shade by the bl ook, is




TIHE COillMNS-JIV.              35
a bed of lilies of the valley, and up under the wall by
the gate is another; and(l one has the cool and the dark,
and the other hls the early spring sunshine; and so
we have the dear little bells, early and late, half tle
summer through.  Then the narcissusses have spread
and spread, and so have the splendid white July lilies;
so that the air is heavy with perfume in the time of
each, friom  the first glacdness of opened doors and
windows and sumnmer balminess, to the long, hot dayts
when the sweet smell comes in on lazy puffs of south
wind through the green shadow of shut blinds.
And the broad old back piazza looks down on it all,
where the ground slopes away in irregular beds of
bloom that have shaped themselves by their growth
and the culture they got just as they asked for it, - in
wide turf spaces between, —under lilacs, snowballs,
and seringcas, and horse-chestnuts and maples, - till
the brown water of the brook runs its sentinel line
between it and the meadow-mowhing beyond.
Down on one side, fromn the west door-yard, beside
the garden wall, across the brook and up again into
the beautiful oak pasture where it loses itself, goes the




.36      PATIENCE STRIONi'S OUTIVNGS.
green hlne, by which the cows have been turned out to
their grass and come home again, morning and night,
ever since my grandfather's fatller built the place.
Along the sides you find the first wild violets and
the little mitchella, and in one place the wild honeysuckle, spicy with odor; anld down at the brook the
fair, slight wind-flowers growing in thousands, making
you think always of a low breeze running along the
ground and lifting up their delicate faces; and up in
the pasture the lesser Solomnon's seal, that I go and
bring home by apronfuls in the late May and early
June; and in the August ripening there are blackberries and thimbleberries under the walls everywhere;
and in October you can go down over the pasture
ledge into the hollows against the wood, and find the
wild grapes, purple and white, lying among their great,
cool leaves against the hot faces of the sun-gathering
rocks.
-Inside the house it is just —our house. Full of us
all; filled up once and never to be emptied of the
presences that have made it home.  All the roons
open into each other, up stairs and down; you can




TIlE CGOlMINGS-hIN.             37
always shut and bolt a door if you like, but it is nice
that they ccan all be set wide. The west door opens
from the porch into a square side passage, up through
which at the back twists a little staircase which you
turn into at the bottom, and turn right out of it again,
because you can't help yourself, at the top; and before
you think of going up, you are up. "' Similarly," as
Dickens says, -l down. A real cute little staircase
that carries out the sentiment of the house, joining
parlors and chambers like a brace, or like the thing
proof-readers put for a sign of a transposal. If you
can't have a hall like a saloon, and a staircase wide
enough for four abreast, then have this,- a little bit
of a turn-round that lands you somewhere else before
you know it, and that don't pretend to be anything
of itself. I hate a middle-sized entry-way, that is
neither out- doors nor in, with two chairs and a hattree.
On the right hand is the kitchen; and if the door is
open, no matter; for you'll only see a white-scrubbed
floor, and a still whiter table, and some bright tins,
and a blazing copper pump and boiler, and a velvet



38       PATIENCE STi ONAG'S OUTI. XUrS.
black stove with a square of fresh-washled oilcloth
around it; and perhaps get a whiff of something nice
baking in the oven.
On the left is the little parlor, — the winter room;
and out of that opens the summer parlor, larger, and
lying at the north-east corner of the house. A door
leads froln this into the front yard, on to the grass
under the mulberry-trees; and another opposite into
the sitting-roonm-, larger than either and'connecting
with both; and from  that you go out on the broad
back piazza, or into the kitchen, and so you have
finished the round.
Upstairs just the same; only there is a little back
stairway nipped out of a corner, so that you're not
obliged to go through other roo1ms to get down from
either. The great chimney-stack is right in the middle, and the sun seems to be on all sides of the house
at once, because of the doors through and throuTh,
that all come opposite to windows, and, if lie looks
into one room, invite him right across into another.
Just so with the breeze in sumnmer time; you can get
it anywhere.




TIIE CO ilNVG S-ILV.             39
And this is only the shell; there is all the filling up.
All the dear old furniture, and curtains, and bedquilts,- of everybody's dresses, —and book-shelves
and books, and pictures and ornaments, that are an
inner shell; ancd the filling up of these, that is the
life; that reaches away in and away out, backward
antd forwardc; that the use and the handCling of these
things, - even the having them before one's eyes, in
moods of pleasantness or pain, of thought or listening, - in times of search and effort, of in-coming and
answering, of love anld prayer and faith and doing,
has madce to repeat itself and link itself all through
with such chains of reminder aind association; that just
the same life could never have been or grown elsewhere, aCnd can never truly feed itself so well as here.
I begin to think I am like the old king of Granada;
fixed in one spot, but with windows opening out every
way' and a magical board on which is repeated for me
the moving of all life that is beyond me and out of
sight; that I may watch, and know, and even truly
handle and rule it all, getting my own out of it as if I
were anmong it.




40       PATIrENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
For we are back again —mother and I; andc our
trunks are unpacked; and this is why I have been all
over the old home, outside anRd in, as people do who
have been away so long.
For I shall never get over the feeling that I hacve
been to Europe, though Eliphalet's folks went without
me, after all. That was what I meant to have said at
the beginninig, only I got so taken up.
I met with an accident, the Saturday before we were
to sail. I fell down the little front staircase, out of
the best chamber door into the kitchen, and broke one
of the bones of mly left leg just above the ankle.
I had to take to my old outings again; the new oles
were not to be, just yet.
" If I want any more, I must sing' it myself."
Or, it will be sung to me, if I listen.




THE LIFE AAND TIE GLORY.            41
IV.
THE LIFE AND THE GLORY.
TIIE dear little mother, brisk as a bee, kind with as
much of God as a motherly heart can hold, has gone
downstairs with Emery Ann.
Emery Ann is our friend in the kitchen; she has
kept the tins and the coppers shining ever since I was
ten years old. Born with a fate and a genius, - to
scrub and to brighten; christened with an inspiration.
They are going to beat whites and yolks of new-laid
eggs, fine sugar, and a little drift of flour, --  barely
enough to hold soul and body together," Emery Ann
says, —into the spongiest, -no, sponge is tough; it
isn't sponge-cake they make, - but the foamiest, puffiest, airiest, yellow tenderness of sweetness that can be
bakled in a pan, and come out with a crispness all over




4  PATIENCE' STWOVNG'S OUTINGYS.
it, just sufficient to hold its rarity iu, and give you a
place to handle and begin on.
The more mother is' driven " the more she call do,
always. She is like flame or gun-cotton.
Try to build a fire with only a little kindling, and be
chary of your wood because of the little there is to
start upon, - give it only one solid stick, and see how
loth it will be to take hold! How it will eat up its
chance, and dodge its work!  -ltow the little flickers
will dwindle and shrink, lile pretences that have no
heart in them, and leave only a smoke and a blacaness
where they just touched what was laicd upon them and
drew back!  Theln give it more to do, before it is
quite burnt out. Lay another stick onl, and another.
Leave little airholes and climbing-places, andc see how
the life leaps up again, reaching to the topmost, after
the nature of all spirit, to which the brilght element is
so close an approach and emblem. You'll build your
fire just by laying it bigger. God makes us burn so.
It is a good thing to remember; I've thought of it
many a winter's morining, wlen I've been down on my
knees on the hearth coaxing the blaze.




TItE LIFE AXN.D TIRE GLO RYa           43
I've thoughlt of the same thing when I've had an old
pair of scissors to deal with; a dull, loose pair, with
no grasp iin them. Try them. on a single thread, or a
thin, flimsy fabric, and what a fuss! They double, and
grind, and fiay and worry, and might as well be one
half on one side of the room and one on the other, for
all the cut you can get out of them. But fold up two
or three thicknesses of the same thing, or set them at
a stout, heavy cloth, and away they go, as young as
ever they were.
I've noticed it true of a good many things.  It is
a principle that runs through the world, and the life
and the doing of it.
A young engineer, fresh from the war, told me about
the gun-cotto:n. If you give it an easy job, it will
take it easy; there'll be very little explosive effect; as
likely as not it won't work at all. But pile on clifficulty; bury it deep; seal it close; let there be tons of
rock or masonry above it and in its way; and it
wakes up; it flings out all its awful force; it rends
and hurls, and shatters; and( tears its escape, through
and up, and o)ut, like a challenged fiend.  It scorns




44       PATIENCE STR1ONV'S OUTI1YGS.
light work; it is at home only among tremendous opposing forces
Emery Ann says mother is the " spunkiest " woman
she ever knew. The more you bother her, the brighter
she'll come out.  The more you put upon her, the better it'll be done.
She will pack a day as you pack a trunk. If you've
only a few large, light things, you can lay them in,
and make a great show of being brimful directly. But
if you've got to crowd close, squeezing in one thing is
always making some little interstice for another. The
busiest day that comes, with her, is sure to leave a
corner of chance for extra work; something that can
be done as well as not, "' seeing she is about amongst
things."  She will stir up a pan of cake because she
finds she has to wait a few minutes for the flat-irons.
If she had been upstairs, and settled down, she might
not have thought she could take the time to come purposely and do it.  So there's that much clear gain.
Busy lives are full of gains like these.
But it is nice to have rest laid out for you, once in a
while, -even by a broken leg. I think, on the whole,




THE LIFE AND TIHE GLOR Y.            45
now I have tried it, that it is rather betterl, if anything,
than headaches. You have the same privilege, and can
make a good deal more of it.
I am too much mother's child to be really lazy; but
I think, for all that, it is one of my outings when I
have to give up and stay in bed awhile. It is miorning all day, then. That lingering pause of rest and
thought, -thought coming in so easily and freshly,
when life is put off a little, and we need not begin
again just yet to do. A time we are sore tempted to
steal a little more of; and that is, truly, so good for
us, that it is given to us now and then, in a whole
slice, perforce. To have the chamber fresh and sweet,
the bed nice with new linen, one's best cap and ruffles
on, and all the little dear familiar things set straight,
and looking upon one round about with their pleasantest faces; to know that one is justified in it all, and
can't help it; but may just take it as a free gift, and
lie softly under the blessing of a ministering love, - I
think it makes what comes of pain a blessedness; a
help, too, for the days beyond.
Mother has done it all for me, just now, sweetly and




46       PAILf7E'NGE STIION' S Ou7TI'-VS.
heartfully; andl has gone down with Emery Ann, as I
said, leaving me here, with the window open, and my
books and paper and pencil on the bed beside me, her
kiss warm on my forehead, and God's rest underne-th
Ine, to wait for the in-tings, and to go out with a soul
like a bird that has all heaven to fly in.
" The Everlasting Arms."  I think of that whenever rest is sweet. HI-ow  the whole earth and the
strength of it, that is almightiness, is beneath every
tiredl creature to give it rest; holding us, always!
No thought of God is closer than tllat.  No human
tenderness of patience is greater than that which gathers in its arms a little child, and holds it, heedless of
weariness. And He fills the great earth, and( all upon
it, with this unseen force of his love, that never forgets
or exhausts itself; so that everywhere we may lie
down in His bosom and be comforted.  WVeariness and
despair and penitence, and pain and helplessness, -
these prostrate themselves; they fling themselves on
the heart of the Father, and he holds them  there I
Jesus fell on his face and prayed.




THE LIFE AND THE GLORIY.              47
A very gentle wind lifts and lets fall the white curtain-edge, and moves tenderly the young leaves.
The great branches are still; only the little outmost
twigs and shoots stir softly and shyly as it touches
them, hiding their faces against each other as if some
holy mystery came close. And so it does.
The first thing I opened my eyes to this mormini
was this little movino of the muslin shade against my
partly open windcow.  It is a living, and not a dead
world that we are born, and wake daily, into: every..
thing moving, and throbbing with life, and breath,
and presence.
It is not death and emptiness we go out into, any
more, when we die; but into the fulness and the inmost of the life behind tihe appearance. In this inmost, how close we shall come to EHim and to each
other!  Closer than we ever did through th te types
and patterns.
People talk about "'physical manifestations" of
spiiitual presence; as if they, by their prying, had
found out some lnew thing, and got at what they never
could reach before.  When God has 6l"never left him



48       PATIENCE STROVON'S OUTINGS.
self without a witness," and the hills and the trees
and the clouds and the grass-blades are forever making signs to us, - the manual of his meanings.' Without the Word was nothing made that is
made."
There is no empty talk with Him.
And this Word is the same, - the self-same, - with
the living, loving, speaking, Christ. Out from  the
Father this yearning, seeking bestowal of himself
came in its fulness by the begetting of the Son. The
whole and uttermost meaning of God in and for his
world. The alphabet of his langtuage in humanity,
holding all its signs and possible words, - beforehand.
The Alpha and Omega.' By him are all things, and
in him all things consist.'
That is all the theology I canll find or come to.
That is enough.  Christ " in the bosom" of the
Father's glory.' God with us " by him.
I can shape it dimly to myself in this way. If a
mortal man could have a glorious and holy conception,
a purpose that should reach far out of him, and could
have such life in himself as to give it life in itself, so




THE LIFE AND THE GLORY.             49
that it should be a love to bless, and a conscious gladness to return to him again, - so that it should, in a
beautiful personality, born of him as his child, and
none the less his own outgoing, be sent to unfold its
work, counselling with the soul that caused it, and
exchanging a sublime and intimate joy; if his spirit,
like the sun, could throw off a thought-planet so, -
then out of him  might have gone forth something
that should be like the Son of God.
Beginning at the other end, working painfully up,
the philosophers have reached part way; finding that
man is the crowning intent of the long labor of creation; not remembering how God's thought is different
from our thought, - that it fulfils itself, and is, and
lives; how he cannot think of anything that straightway shall not be; how when he thought his Fatherhood and his creation, and loved his thought, it may
be that his Christ must needs have been born, - that
his thought might know itself, and love Him back,
and do his will, and perfect his joy, which cannot be
alone.
The Man; whose life was to be illustrated, in time,
4




50       PATIENCE STROIVG'S OUTINGS.
by all Ten; members of his body; the fillness.of
Him who filleth all in all. In him, as he in God.
This was the glory that he prayed for; the glory
that he came into our human life, fallen away froim
the Divine Pattern, to redeem  unto himself; that
which he had with the Father, before the world was.' I am, before Abraham."
"The beginning — the first-born fiom the dead;"
from the dead of that which was not; God's gift of
himself unto himself; his image, whlen in that image
he would make living souls.  "The first-born of
every creature;"'; in whonm it pleased the Father that
there should all fuilness dwell."  Does not that grand
first chapter of Colossians tell it all?
And then, again, the beginning to the Hebrews, -
to the people who with their old traditions of creation,
and their sole revelation of Jehovah, would most of
all look to be told of the origin of Christ far back in
God.
"VWho, being the brightness of his glory, and the
express image of his person, and ulpholding call things
by the word of his power," - this very God-strength




TIE LIFE AND THE GLORY.             51
of the Everlasting Arnms that is forever under us, - is
blessed out of the deep heart of Almightiness with an
infinite human joy.' Thou art my Son; this day
have I begotten thee. I will be to him a Father, and
he shall be to me a Son.  And let all the angels of
God worstlip him  "
Can I believe too much iiA Christ, the Lord?
Perhaps the apostle might mistake, as people
measuring him to-day, would reason; but I, Patience
Strong, mistake also many things. How can I judge?
I think I had bhetter be mistakeh with Paul, who had
the nearer and the grander vision, than by my feeble
self.
More, again. I will be mistaken with THim, when
he says, -" I-e that hath seen me bath seen the
Father.  The only begotten Son, which is in the
bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. No manl
cometh unto the Father but by me."
Somebody greater than I should make out the awful
argument. I am  only Patience Strong. These are
the thoughts that come to me of Jesus, and they come
only so. They come in flashes; lightning out of the




.52      PATIENACE STIPOXG'S OUT1NGS.
one part unto the other part under heaven; linking
great words together, and showing the glory into
which we are all baptized: the glory of the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Lying here, as to my body, so quietly, so helpless,
ly, - thoughllt-outings stretch the farther and higher.
First, a mere pleasantlness; then a rest, growing
holy in its comfort, and the reminder of it leading up
to Him who saith to all the weary, - Lo, I will give it
you; come unto me. IHow one that is again with the
Everlasting Arms!  I-low  Jesus promises for the
Father, and the Father for himi! How, sitting at the
feet of the One, we are lifted up unto the bosom of
the Other! 
My Lordc  - and my God!
The words of an impetuous faith, so joined together
and sunderecd by no rebuke of his, are creed enough
for nme.
I do not care to go further than the feeling, or to fit
the words to any precise doctrine.  How can we make
plan and specification of these things?  They are too
high and wonderful.  We who 10o not know ourselves




THE LIFE A.ATD'7 ITE GLOI'RY        53
or each other, how shall we measure an1d investigate
the personal rel.ation'between Christ and the Father?
If we cannot understand to believe  even earthly
things, how shall we believe if we are told of heavenly things?  What and if we sh-unld see the Son of
man ascend up whlere he was before?
That which stands so joined together, in the word
of Christ, and iii the impulse of faith, is enough. The
manifestation of Jesus and the nearness of God.  To
feel him close is to be drawn into the Infinite Glory.
"Christ raised from the dead by the glory of God."
This, that Paul said after, was simply, perhaps, what
Thomas felt.  The recojnition of the Son and of the
Father, which is forever glad, and forever one. So
that' "he that abideth in the doctrine of Christ hath
both'the Father and the Son;" and receiling him, the
Lord, we do always in the self-same moment receive
ancd fill ourselves with God.
I have gone high and far, to-clay.  Here must the
end be, and the hush; - at His feet! 




54      PATIENCE STROl' TNG'S 0 U'INxG5S.
V.
INTO THE MEANINGS.
I KNEW that the world was built by correspondences
before I ever heard of Swedenborg; that there were
mleanings in things, and that things had to be made
for the giving of the meanings. I suppose I have said
it, over and over, already,- it is so much in my mind.
And why not? Since the whole world - and worlds
-are the eternal telegraphy from God's thought into
OUrs; meant, therefore, to be in our. minids, and that
continually; the very inpouring of life.
I have read them out, some of them, in New Church
writings since; and I have only wondered that there
had ever needed to be such a system  built; as if
Christ had not sufficiently indicated and inaugurated
it, when he translated all his holy lessons straight
from the glowing parables of God. And I think - at
least it always seems to me - that the great trouble




INTO  THE 3MEANJINGS.             155
with the Swedenborgian system is that it is too definite. You can't make a dictionary of these things.
The Spirit takes them and uses them as it Nwill. They
are broad and elastic, and many-sided; they show
this to the soul to-day, and that to-morrow, as it
needs; and every showing is true.  And the soul
must grow up into them, as a child into a language
into which it is born; which is such a different, livingl tlhing from the same language taught by rule and
method of letter and construction.  That was the way
they heard, of old, by the Spirit, each in his own
tongue, in which lhe was born, - no other.
I klnow that water means truth, and cleansing; the
truth that enters through the intelligence, and the
clear-seeing of God's signs.
But you cannot say it all, in saying that.
It is gladness and gift, and many things more.
Round and round the world, through all the thirst of
it, it goes, taking its way in many changing formus.
In it are moving things; things that are born of, and
are joyous in it, as our thoughts and knowledges are
born of and glad in, the full, deep sea that spiritually




56       PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
holds them. It cools, it comforts, it quenches, it Ce..
lights. It is the fine element by which are transfusec
all the subtleties of vegetable life; all the juices of
our physical bodies. It is the vehicle for giving or
good, and for taking away of superfluity and evil;
it penetrates, solves, perspires; it is one of God's
great, comprehensive wonders.
Jesus could promise no greater, nor fulller, than to
say, I'  will give you water; and it shall be in you,
springing up to everlasting life." ]Water is joy, —
satisfying; all craving and answer meet in this embodied pledge of heaven.
If I were to give you some thoughts of mine about
it, just as I once wrote them down, perhaps you would
sa1y, " It is not Patience Strong."  That is why I
hardly like to give theml; and yet they belong just
here. Thinkings trace themselves round, until they
meet their own curves again, like some intricate pattern that joins its line and 3hows itself suddenly
one.
I was always a little afraid of big words. When
we were children, Eliphalet used to call me Polly




AINTO  THE MEANINGS~                 57
-Syllable, if ever I used them; and nothing  made me
more ashamed.
So I have mostly kept my verses to myself. MIother
sees them; but then she knows; she understands
ways and fashions, times andlc  occasions.  She knows
that the same woman can put herself into a gingham
short gown and old shoes, or high-heeled slippersandcl
a long train; and that nothing is easier, perhaps, than
such o-utside change, or makes less matterto the real
woman inside.  I think she could write poetry perfectly well herself, and come out of it again into her
simple Yankee every-day, exactly the same as ever.
We lift up our words to meet our thoughts; and let
them down again for homelier uses.
Anyway, I just cam Patience Strong; I am sure of
that, myself, whether or no.  Other people must make
what they can1 out of it.
I wrote this, then, about the
RAIN.
From all this vital orb of earth
A breath exhaleth to the air,
That, heaven-distilled to equal grace,
Falls, a fresh bounty, everywhere.




5 PA TIEV CE STR ONG'S OUTIIVNS.
The dark mould drinks the sunset cloud,
And tastes of heaven; unconsciously,
Green forest-depths are stirred to.catch
A far-off flavor of the sea.
No drop is lost. God counteth all.
And icy crests, in glory crowned,
With faint rose-petals yield and take,
And so the unwasted joy goes round.
One spirit moveth in it all;
One life that workoeth large and free,
To each, from all, for evermore,
Giving and gathering silently.
God's stintless joy goes round, goes round
No soul that dwelleth so apart
It may not feel the circling pulse
Outwelling from the Eternal Heart.
Athirst! athirst! The sandy soil
Bears no glad trace of leaf or tree;
No grass-blade sigheth to the heaven
Its little drop of ecstasy;
Yet other fields are spreading wide
Green bosoms to the bounteous sun;
And palnms and cedars shall sublime
Their rapture for thee, waiting one!
It comes with smell of summer showers,
To stir a dreamy sense within,




INTO THIE MEANVllATS.                        59
Half hope, and half a pained regret, -
It may be, - or, it might have been!
The joy that knows there is a joy;
That scents its breath, and cries,'tis there!
And, patient in its pure repose,
Receiveth so the holier share.
I know a life whose cheerless bound
Is like a deep and silent chasm
Left dark between the daybright hills,
In time long past, by fiery spasm.
The mlocking sunlight leaps across;
The stars, with Levite glance, go by;
So vainly doth its dreary depth
Plead to the far-off, pitiless sky.
Yet ever from the flinty marge,
And down each rough and cavernous side,
Trickle the drops that bear their baln
From ferny bank and pasture wide.
It drinketh, - drinketh, - day by clay;
And still, within its bosom deep,
The waiting water, filtered clear,
Doth in a crystal beauty sleep.
Waiting and swelling, till it find
God's outlet, long while placed and planned,.
Whence, strong and jubilant, it shall sweep
Down, with a song-burst, o'er the land.




GO       PATIENVCJE STRONG'S OUTI.NGTS.
I don't think I had any life in particular in my
mind when I said that.  Certainly, I wouldn't have
you suppose it was my own. And yet, my own may
have looked so to me in some clark moment or other.
For I have had imy pinches and pains; and I have
seen people who were shut up from much of the sunlight that seems to be everywhere; and out of thle
waiting  and the wanting that so I know of comes
the comfort that we may all take together.
Water is one thilng. Then we come up higher and
find another, lying just above it; penetrating  everywhere, yet more intimately; not to be seen or handled,
only to be breathed and felt. VWe are born of water,
and of the spirit. There is the life that comes in
through the undcerstanding - that we can stop and lay
hold of, and pour back and forth, and put into vessels;
that is the mind-perception.  There is also the soulperception, which is the breath of God; the upper
atmosphere, i a which our finer being lives, and that
pulses and flows as it lists, and we catch the delicate
motion and hear the sound thereof, but can never tell




INTO TIlE flEANRINGS.               61
whence it comes, or whither it has gone. Yet out of it
we die.
And in it moves about us a tenderer and more beautiful life than the life of the waters.  Winged creatures come and go; and there are many sweet voices
therein.
Whllat does it mean, then, this clear, blue firmamlent?
Whallt do -the birds mean?
I lay on my sofa and thought about it; waitinlg  for
Emery Anin to bring' me urp my tea.
And while I waited the chimney-swifts were flyirg
about in their quick, gracefil circles, and away off
over the wood a great hawkl was flapping slowly, and
tiny things in bushes and branches were making their
little home-flights and happy heart-chirps; andc somehoaw the wide air, and the sounds, ndcl the stillness,
and the sure and beautiful motion -the region of life
so close and yet so out of grasp - opened a strangoe
sense to me; a sense of the near and intangible things
of the spirit.
Not a great emptiness, - untraversable, - but full
of movement and errand.  Yes, that is what it tells




62       PATIENCE STRO nG'S 0 UTI1NCS.
us. That out and above and beyond where we can
bodily go, God has made thingas with wings, that lift
themselves in this finer element, and go straight and
swift from  point to point, whither they need and
whither he will. Out of our visioln, away over forests
and waters, to far-off places, and back to our side.
They are thoughts, again, -those other thoughts,
more instant and keen, not of the mind-life, but of
the soul, -that reach, and long, and go forth andcl
divine their way through the invisible~
The eagles gather together ~t that which draws
themn, and " the doves fly to their windows;" and the
little sparrows, even, are safe; for God takes care of
them, and not one shall fall to the ground without
him. HIe also feedeth them.
They are affecti uns, that find that to which they are
sent, let them forth from whence y3ou will; that know
their climate and their food, and their clear and pleasant haunts; and that link the latitudes together.
Noah floated long upon the cllrk waters; then into
the air lie sent forth a dove; she came back. to his
heart at first, bearing no hope; then she brought him




IN~TO THIE MEA NINiOS.             63
a greenness of peace; and by and by she went and
stayed.
So it is after a grief. The thought that goes out
comes back, a restless pain; after a while it brings
some leaf of healing; then it finds the green place of
its longing, and we feel in ourselves its far and sweet
alighting, and we know that by and by we shall be
there.
That is the difference between the thing and the
type of it. The bird flies, and we have no more hold
of it. The thought goes, and something out of our
own selves - some real thing —has met the dawn,
or has found the mountain, or entered beforehand into
the blessed summer.
I was so glad in these things that came to me tonight; so glad of the steps and shades by which
earth climbs and rarefies till it touches heaven. It
seems as if God brought us almost there; thinpinog
life till it is all but spirit, - touching its forms with a
more delicate glory, from  the rock and the water to
the air and the light; from the coarseness of touch
and taste to the sweet subtleties of sound and odor,




64       PATTIENCE STRI ONG'S O UTINVGS.
and the faint perceptions of something possible beyond even these.
In a twilight like this, or in the tender, early morning, - when the music is just a breath in the birds'
throats, and the fragrance is somzething that you
hardly know how you get, whether through sense or
spirit, - one might seem to have no choice which world
one would wakell into out of the beautiful dream; one
is so upon the threshold.
WJhen Jesus said, "' The kingdom  of heaven is at
hand," I don't think he meant so nmuch a kingdom
coming, as a kingudoma he'e.
The kingdoil of heaven is'" close by;" that is what
" at hand" means.
"Say not there are yet four imonths,"- or four
cycles;' lift up your eyes, and look; the fields are
white already;" and the harvest of the kingdom is
ripe, in the very midst of the world.
I was so glad in these thouglhts that I couldn't wait
for mother to come in; — she had gone out, by very
hard begging of  iine, to drink tea with NMrs. Shreve;
so when Emery Ann came up with mine, that is, with




INTO THE MEANI7NGS.                65
my fresh milk and my biread and butter, and my currants and raspberries, red and white, mixed in a little
glass dish and covered with white sugar, -I couldn't
help catching at her.  Besides, something else occurred to me all in a flash.'" Just look there, Emery Ann, please; on that little
table in the corner. See if the book isn't there that
l3iss Philena brought for me the other day: in a
green binding;' Thoughts in my Garden(, - that's it.
Now, wait a minute." And I held her fast by a corner
of her apron.
"6IWait a minute; I don't believe a bit but that it
will be here. It oulght to be."
I turned the pages as quickly as I could with one
hand; I dared not leave go with the other of Emery
Ann; I wanted somebody.
"' Birds and  other things!'  Wait a minute.'Birds and all winged creatures correspond to' —
there, I knew it! Exactly the same!  Just as I
found  it out, my own self. Emery Ann, when two
people find out the same thing, you see it's sure."
Hum! I clon't know. Lots of people have found
5




66       PATIENCE STR ONGV'S OUTINGS.
out lots of mistakes. Lies, beside. And stuck to'eml."
"But not this way.  Not things that you find
straight out, by just looking at them. Emery Ann, I
know what the birds mean. And she says so, too.
They're thoughts.  Things that go, - really go,where nothing else can. Heaven is just as full of
goings and comings as the sky is of birds. There's
a way everywhere; for wings, or something."
Emery Ann always rubs everything down.
Hum! " she said again.  "6 Like as not. That
accounts for all sorts of flightiness."




INVTO TIIE OLD AND TIIE IVEW.          67
VI.
INTO THE OLD AND TIHE NEW.
WHEN I have once had a thought, — of my own or
one that is brought to my remembrance, - it keeps
coming back, bringing others with it, - all its relations. It joius this with that, showing how all belong
together, and illustrate and strengthen each other.
The mind in its working, overlaps itself, like the tide,
or like the way a little child takes to learn a verse or
a hymn. Over and over, one line; then that, and the
next joined with it; then the two, with a third. So
on, always beginning again, or back for a little way.
It is the way of the kingdom of heaven, out of which
one brings the treasures new and old.
Living by hints. Since that came into my head, it
has helped everything.
The grandest and truest and sweetest things are
always hints, — no more. The minute you try to be




6&8      P.PATIENCE STRO NG'S OUTINGS.
literal and explicit with them  they are gone. You
cannot argue or explain the things of the spirit. The
highest and most intimate perceptions are glimpses.
Things said all out are platitudes; feeling analyzed
and explained is dead before it is dissected; dead,
and time it was buried.
Our human love, and our heavenly faiths, the surest
comforts of Christ's gospel, hang  themselves upon
suggestions.
Jesus never says all. He lets fall golden words,
that provide no record, into the great deep where common words are lost; he touches the key-note of a truth
with a single divine smiting, and leaves its circle of
sound to spread; only calling down after it into the
years, "H le that hath ears to hear let him  hear."
It is the secret of inspiration; the difference between
that and common study and thinking.  It is the justification of Moses before the computers and the classifiers. And that is just what came andi joined itself to
my notion of the in-tings, - the hints.
I have been reading lately among these things that
are written by the plummet and line of science, and




INTO TIlE OLD AND  FTHE NETVW,          69
that are so full of jealous anxiety about the old faiths
that did not wait for them.
The wonder to me is what they find to conflict about,
- these philosophers and theologians. Why the ones
are so indignant at Moses, and the others so fearful
and uproused in his behalf? When he never undertook - or God by him - anything at all in the direction of such antagonism.
Inspiration is not science, or research. It is even a
more glorious thing. It does not dig down into darkness, carrying its torch; it reaches upward and grasps
the very light out of heaven. It sees the red in the
sky while the evil and adulterous generations are yet
seeking after their signs.
What did it matter to Moses how many strata deep
the old deposits of earth-crust might have been in his
day, or what details of life and construction they were
hereafter to reveal?  I-He went away back behind them
all,. into the unmade worlds and the loving counsel of
God. HIe stood up among the nations that were worshipping sun and moon and fire and beast, and cried
out:  " In the beginning  GOD created  [tle heavens




70       PATIENCE STROING'S O UTINGS.
and the earth."  Time was when His life had not yet
been given, when all this matter of which your heaven
and earth, your sun and moon, are made, was void.
Only the Spirit of God moved over the face of it.
Then, at last, He said, C" Let there be light!"  And
there was light.
I wonder if Moses did not go at one leap above and
beyond all science in this, his divine apprehension?
If this great hint of his does not touch at once the
subtile inmost of the life God gave and continually
gives, into his world?. One breath of His command,
one pulse of his will, and straightway every particle
is luminous with presence, instinct with electric
force.
Have they come to anything nearer the awful lifesecret than this?  Have they entered farther into the
holy place, in their newest theories of nebulous mist,
golden with glory, gathering and revolving and flinging off into space by the grand primal energy which
can be only what the prophet declares, by his direct
insight, the informing word of God?
It was this that Moses hzad to declare; not any ac



INVTO THE OLD AND TH rE NVETI.          71
count of intervenin~g processes.  What if he had waited until the last fossil was dug up?
H-e waited for nothing; neither for geology, nor for
the measure or shape of the planet, nor for the boundary line of the system. I-He talks superbly of the
heavens and the earth; of waters under the firmament
and waters above the firmament; of the seas and of the
dry land; of the gathering together and the setting
apart. He does not go into detail. H- only deals
with the magnificent outline. One page of a little book
holds all his words about it. He sings his glorious
song of the creation, that stands true, in the soul of it,
whatever comes to be proved or overturned in circumstance. I-Ie enumerates the orders of life and being,
and says, simply, "None of these are gods. God
gave his life into them all. By separate thought he
made them  each to be. None came but by his act."
And, after each clause of the great story that could
only be a holy poem, after each declared creative impulse, he repeats his refrain: "And God saw that
this also was good. And the evening and the morning




*72      PA TIENCE STRO~NG'S OUTINGS.
were the first," —or the  second, or the third,dclay."
There is no absurd fable in this. There is only a
grand hinting at precisely what the philosophers are
proving,- the mighty order, and succession, and patient, sure development of God's work.
We are such poor, little, letter-bound creatures,
thinking only of sunrise and sunset; not learning,
even, what, our own day is to us, of which the earthnmovement,- the shine and the shadow, are only the
types and the correspondence.  When we live true
days, - days like God's, - making each a step Land an
accomplishment, and entering into his morning and
evening joy,-then  we shall know. We get faint
glimpses when we have been a little faithful, and a
great deal helped of him.  When there comes a purpose with the freshness, and a certainty of something
done with the decline; when the outward day has its
inward counterpart; when our whole soul has turned
itself to its sun and strength in the heaven, and is on
in its orbit over a spiritual space.
After such pattern in his own ineffable and eternal




INTO THIE OLD AND THIE NEW.            73
Life, I-le was ma7cing our little planetary dlays. What
had they to do with nmeSasuring him?
Six dclays, and then the Sabbath. The rest God has
in the depths of his own spirit over his work; the blessedness that returns upon him out of his giving; the
sublime alternation in the Divine Nature, of which this
seventh day, also, that he gives us, is a symbol and
result.
For it is true all through, as everything is; working
out from God into the last circle of his providence; it
runs into our literal weeks and days. Every Saturday
night-fall and Sunday dawn of a busy life proves it, to
soul and body. It is because of the image of Him in
which we are made, that there is possible and needful
to us, also, his own glad peace; his rest, and reflow,
and gathering up. What has this either, as to himself and his mysterious periods, to do with our mere
hours and reckoning?
It seems to me as if Moses would laugh at our foolish interpretations and disputes; as if it could hardly
have occurred to him that we would mistake him so.
It seems to me he was grander in his ig(norance and in



74       PATIEWAGCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
sight than we are in our little bits of fact and calculalation that we have picked up and are continually'
rectifying.
He stood with God, receiving of him sublime intuitions; uttering them with lofty fervor in poetic speech.
It was that recognition which waits for no slow learning; which needs it not; which makes the fisherman
of Galilee able to say to the face of Christ, " Thou art
the Son of the living God! "  And to'which the Lord
makes answer, " Blessed art thou!  For flesh and
blood have not revealed it unto thee, 4ut my Father
which is in heaven. Behold, this is the rock whereon
I will build my churchl; and the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it."
God has forever built his church on this. He never
hid away his living truth, the need of man, in the dead
rocks or the deep earth. He gives it, quick and warm,
into the human spirit; it is nigh, even in our mouths
and in our hearts.
I think the song of MLoses and his bold story of the
Genesis, - so daring in its personification, so deeply and
minutely true of human spirit and life in the Father's




INTO THE OLD AND THIE NEW.              75
hands, - will stand, and will sound glorious and interpret wonderfully in the ears of men, while many a theory and philosophy shall shift and crumble. Because it
is behind all these; it holds fast by the skirts of God's
own garment; because it reads forward and not backwa rd; it looks from eternity down into time. By and
by, with slow footsteps, the knowledge of time and the
record in things will lead up to it, and they will find
themselves at one.
I think God was good and wise to give us himself
first and his story afterward. I sometimes wonder
why these worshippers of fact do not find a fact as
great as any in the existence and perpetuation of that
which we call the Scripture of Revelation. That God
has not suffered what he has given into the souls of
men to perish without a sign, any more than the tl'ilobites or the remains of the cave-dwellers.  He keeps
his outside story with care, and leads us to it in his
own good time, delighting our minds with the knowledlge of his wonders. He keeps also,- a living thing'
among us, - the record of the highlest reach of the soul
after him, and of his fullest inward gift.




76       P  TIENCE STRO 0ANW'S OUTINGLS.
Simply that the Bible is, makes me sure that God's
glory is in it.
Only, I know that having given once, it is that he
means to and mnust needs give again; and that the instant bestowal must lighten upon the old; that the one
without the other is dead. Therefore the dead (lo
bury their dead. " In thy light," only,'" shall we see
light."
We can dig for fossils; we must beg of God for
himself.
iy outings are getting to be such sermons!
Living is a strange thing. If you put it together
jutst as it is given out it hardly looks as if it belonged.
to the same piece. It sounds positively wicked if you
tell of it. Dusting and divinity, -prayers and piecrust, - mix themselves up together. Joseph's coat
was of many colors. So are God's love and gift.
To-morrow, perhaps, I shall lay   Origin and Destiny" by,~and be making  the sleeves of my new ruffled
sack that I mean to look so nice in; and I shan't seeml
to have any longer reach or tether than the few inches
of whip-hem and cord-gathering that I shall be doing.




INTO TIIE OLD ANTD TIHE NE. T.         77
I shall like it too; and my whole clday will be taken up
with it, and if I finish it all I shall go to bed with one
of my little - cambric - satisfactions.
Well, He does also a great many little, and a greatmany pretty, things.
We cannot be too little to be like Him; nor so great
as to work outside of Him.
I wonder when I shall open this parcel that Eliphalet left for ine when he went away?  It is to be
"sometime when I am particularly low in my mind,
and want something to hearten me and chirk me up."
Eliphalet admires to talk like all the old aunts andl
grandmothers once in a while, and that was the message he sent out with it by Gertrude, She said, in her
pretty way, that it was "~a fairy gift; a nut to be
cracked when the time of need came."
It feels like a book. M3aybe it is some little picture.
I like to wonder what it is; I don't know but that if I
hadn't such a plenty of other things to keep me from
being down-hearted, I might, 6' chirk up" just on the
guessing, and never need anything -more.




78     PATJEN7CG' STWON&'S OUTINVGS.
That is such a goocd, brim-full word, - hearten! It
gives you the reason why. Nobody can be low in
their mind until they have first got low in their heart.
But I haven't wanted much chirking or heartening
yet. I haven't had the least first bit of a chance to
run down anywhere.
So I keep the little parcel, " till called for;" to look
at and guess about. As long as I don't open it, it
may be anything; and it's always well to have the
medicine on the shelf, and to take an umbrella with
you to " spite off the rain."  As Emery Ann says.




" PORZINO."                 79
vII.
6 FORZINOo"
EMERY ANN had killed a fly that had been buzzing
round her nose.
"There!" she cried, with satisfaction, as he fell
from between her hands, - " there's one less of'em 1 "
" One less little life in the world," said I, hypersentimentally.
" Well, maybe he'll be something better next time,"
said Emery Ann.
" Do you believe in that? " I asked her,
" Forzino," said she.
Emery Ann was not talking Italian. It was the
Yankee which, being interpreted, means " As far as I
know."
And that is as far as a Yankee, or anybody else, can
go.
As far as we know, why shouldn't it be?




80       PATIENCE ST1WOiN'S OUTINYGS.
Why these pains of life  and death for things
for which there is to  be nothing  " better next
time"?
I wonder if anybody ever suggested, as a solution
of the development question, the idea of spiritrlca
"selection."  We hear enough of" natural selection,"
and of how it may be that whole races live and propagate and die, struggling toward an attainment of more
perfect organization, to be realized after they are dust
or fossil.
What of the seed of life itself?
What good does it do the mollusk that there is to be
a vertebrate by and by? or the monkey that there are
men to come?  Or men, in their turn, that there are to
be sons of God again upon the earth when their mistakes and half-developments are over?
What if no life is ever lost?  If God giveth it a
body, —to every seed its own, —as it pleaseth him,
over and over, up and on?
Two things stand right up in the way.
Deaths also; over and over.
Forgetfulness.




" FORZINVO.'"               81
But then,-" forzino,"  again.  How  far do we
know?
Only the dead can tell what death has been. It
may have been - many times - an ecstasy.
Emery Ann's " forzino" set me out on this quest.
Pain only gets a soul when it comes to man; only
begins to get something near it when it comes to the
orders nearest human in their larger instincts. To
other things it is always a surprise, not knowledge
and reason: a surprise  repeated from  moment to
moment, as long as it lasts. And a surprise is nothing except as you can turn round and look at it, or
expect another.
A dog or a horse will cringe and howl, or quiver
and snort with the terror which is the spiritual pain,
when a danger that can suggest, approaches. A moth
will burn itself half to cinder, and struggle back with
its last strength into the flame again.
Suffering that is all of the body may not be, in our
way of appreciation, suffering at all.
A nman knows what is the matter with him. That is
the trouble. He carries back the nerve-report to the
6




82       PA_.TIlENGCE STRONG'S OUTIvNGS.
centre of a grand and intense vitality.  He has eaten
of. the tree of knowledge that is in the midst of the
garden. The higher the civilization the greater the
dread of injury and death. The Chinaman and the
savage have little, or none at all.
Instantaneous pain is said to be no pain. There is
neither expectation  nor afterthought.   A  sudden,
terrible hurt benumbs itself.  It is too swift and
strong. We do not know what has happened to us.
It is after we begin to find out, and the mind takes
part, - remembers, anticipates, imagines, compares,
watches, -that the agony begins. It is a thing of
the spirit.
It may be that we only, who can make of it a sacrament, are baptized into the full intimacy of suffering.
It may be that for any creature who can approach
our knowledge of it, it is by just so much, in them
as in tus, the working toward a " far more exceeding
glory."
God is merciful. HIe takes care of his own mysteries. I-He gives to nothing more than it can bear, or
more than shall be good.




"FORZIVNO."                   83.Perhaps the chief wonder, after a great physical
hurt, is that it had not been harder to endure.
There are blessed laws of alleviation; bounds beyond which are insensibility and rest; possibly, even,
as heat and cold at their excessive points are one,- as
great joy is a pang, and deep grief a strange blessedness,- there may be also an agony to rapture, known
only to them who are taken into the mystery.  There
is always circumstance; the special providing for
each experience, which is never forgotten; that which
makes us say afterward, "1 If it had not been just so;
if there had been a little more, or a little different!"
It is never more; it is never different; it is always
just what we can bear.
God is gracious, not to our souls only, but to our
bodies; " not suffering any to be tempted" - tried,
proven — "beyond that they are able;" but making
always " some way of escape."
We can leave it all with Him.
If the s" whole creation travaileth in pain together," it is surely " for the glory which shall be revealed."




84       PATIENCE STR ONGV'S OUTIlNGS.
But then, besides, the forgetfulness; the blank, behind and before!
If life has climbed so, why should we not remember
the steps?
Perhaps we shall come to it, when all the glory is
revealed. Perhaps the further we go, - the more we
include, - the further we shall remember back.
MIeantime, at this moment, we do know what nothing less than human can. We can divine the life that
is below us; all its meanings are ours. The insect in
the sunshine has, perhaps, in its own little atom of
consciousness, no more positive sensation of its separate joy, than the man has, looking on; reading it
so, and bringing it back for comparison to some sense
of his own, included in his larger being. Somewhere
in him is just this very pleasantness: where did he
get it? The insect, knows nothing of his gladness.
Somewhere in him - the man — is the flight and
freedom of the bird in the air; the cool delight of the
fish in the sea-depths; the bright, brisk busyness of
the squirrel in the still, green wood.  He knows it all.
Why does the child love better than anything the




"FOtRZIVO."                  85
stories of little lives like these; the pretty fables
about dormice and lizards, ants and butterflies, bees
and robins?
I don't pretend to declare why; I don't assert anything; I only say, as Emery Ann does, -" forzino i "
Above, they know us as we know these. We shall
come, some time, to know even as we are known.
Then we shall hold it - perhaps remember it - all.
I said something of this to Emery Ann. Not as I
have said it here, but just in the way of common talk.'You see," I suggested, as to the question of pain,
everything isn't always as bad as it seems. What
-we have never tried ourselves, we cannot tell about.
Doctors say that a good deal that looks like terrible
suffering - spasms, and such things - imay be mere
nmuscular action."
" That's very comfortin' -- to the doctors,"  said
Emery Ann.  6" They've tried'em, perhaps. But it
don't take a doctor to tell that things show for more'n
they are. Whiy, bare ugliness does. Everybody gets
along with their own; but I've noticed folks, — I don't
mind homeliness, now, any more than I do kitchen




86       PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINVGS.
chairs, if they are clean and whole, and set straight;
but I can't bear faces that seem to want clearin' up,
— well, with mzouths, say, that you'd think they'd
hate to keep their own tongues inside of. And as to
noises and fuss, I've seen a piece of work made over
takin' a nap, with jerkin' and snorin', that you'd say
was fits if yon'd never come across it before. I guess
it's pretty near right, most of it; things are made
frightfull that we'd better try to keep clear of. At
any rate, we can't fix it now, if it isn't."
Emery Ann is never uneasy about anything that she
can't " fix; " what she can, she has no peace- of mind
with till it is done. She doesn't fix her paragraphs
though; she drops in her prepositions and her objective cases just when she happens to get hold of them,
and her relative pronouns set up for themselves in
sentences of their own, whether they ever had any
antecedents or not.
Aunt HI-etty Maria has been down to stay a fortnight with us. She and mother have been so comfortable together.




"FORZINVO."                  87
I don't think there is really anything nicer than old
ladies; two together, especially.
The white caps, and the spectacles, and the slow,
gentle ways that people get when they are old, and
the Sabbath-peace that they sit clown in, and the
fieighborliness of souls that have lived so many selfsame years on the earth, and that may expect to begin
young again so near together,-  all this that is in
mother's window, now, behind the larch boughs, is
such a really beautiful thing-!
I am afraid we are losing our old ladies out of New
England, just as we are losing our peaches; the' finest
flavor of autumn  time.  Nobody seems to realize
it.'People are so taken up with looking for the
coming woman, that they forget all about the going'
one.
For that matter, we are in danger of losing our
young ladies too.  At, first they won't let themselves
be, any more than at last they will let themseives go,
as they were meant to.  So that freshness and simnpleness, - gentle and beautiful fading,- by and by th ere
will neither of them. be seen, if things go on; but in




88       PATIENCE STRONG1'S OTTIYS:G.
their stead one universal, melancholy faclge and
wrinkle, from sixteen to sixty.
Women used, at thirty-five or so, to put on modest,
delicate, submissive little caps; and then they could
grow gray or bald under them  without a separate
agony for every hair; now, when the locks bleach,
instead of being accepted and worn, in their beautiful
whiteness, as the light of heaven touching upon one's
head, they are Mrs. S. A. Allened; and when they
thin, — ah, worse contingency! -they are deployed
painfully and insufficiently over the needful space, and
a satire of unaccounted-for abundance pinned on behind or atop.
People used to find out ways of mellowing and
sobering in their dress, too, as the woods begin to do
in September, and so have their own especial beauty
as well as the green June hers. There wzere things
once that were " too young" for middle age to bedizen
itself with. And there were things also, just as-pretty
in their time, that young girls had to grow to.
I won't say anything about manners; they can't be
peeled off, or mucilaged on; what the soul puts forth,




" FOlIZITO."-                89
will be; and if it doesn't put forth, — well, we lose
our peaches and our golden leaves.
H-Iere it is; women may choose, - this or thati
they must choose, and take the consequences.
They may ripen their beautiful elder womanhood,
fair with its quiet and content, noble acnd sweet with its
larger life and loving, that gives us at last the real,
clear old lady, and without which the dear old lady
can never be; or they may hold on desperately as old
girls, and wrinkle up just as they are; that way
makes the Mrs. Skewtons. You can't have results
without processes; you have got to make up your
mind deliberately, when you come to the crest-line of
life, in what fashion you will go down into  the
years.
There is a time, no doubt, when it seems sad and
hard; when the path first turns, and the eastward
heaven of youth lies behind the hill; when the glad
little brooks begin to run the other way, instead of
leaping to meet you; but go on, like one of God's
women; it shall be an easy and tender slope under
your feet; anld the lowering sun shall shine upon your
In I  JIrI  lI1I  lVI 3VL




90       PAI7YE'NC'E STRONG'S OUTTINGS.
steadfast face to glorify it, and at the foot is the
broad, sweet valley, and the river of your full, deep
peace.
There is where my clear little mother has helped me
so.  It is beautiful going on just after her.  And
when I sit and look at the two there in her window,
with their work and their caps and their cosiness,
and hear them  say to  each  other what a little
while ago it seems, -the time before their lives began
to run apart, —it is an outing that I can't get any
othei way; a reaching on, by something like heaven's
own counting, over the years, to the time when nothing shall seeni farL back or away, or tedious to have
been borne; and heaven itself shall be the nearest
of all.
I read them my thinkings about Pain and Change,
when I had written them clown.
"Yes," saidl Aunt I-Hetty 3M1aria.  " If only God
made all the pain, and gave it to us. But what about
the pains wve have ectrned? The pains of our sins?
Maother spoke out, then; quick, before I could.
"Vhy, Hetty 3aria, the thief got that answered




"FORZINO."                  91
for us. And the Lord gave him  part of his own
peace, and promised him Paradise."
The cross of Love is close beside the cross of Sin.
Jesus hung between the malefactors.
They "knew not what they did;" God knew, and
meant it so.




92       PAi TIENaCE ~STWOJRS  OUTJ1G'S8.
VIII.
INTO DARK CLOSETS AND NEIGHBOR-IIOUSES.
"DON'T ever do that," said Aunt 1Hetty Maria.
"Carry your candle as straight as you can, but never
go prowling back into dark closets to look after mischief that you haven't done."
" It's clear fidget, I know," said mother; " but I've
done it many a time myself."
I had been looking for something in the little clothesroom. I knew perfectly well that my candle hadn't
snapped while I was there, and that I hadn't held it
near anything; and yet, after I brought it back to
mother's room, and gave her the roll of linen she
wantedl, I went quietly to the closet again, and shut
myself in, in the dark, and looked. When I calme
back the second time and sat down, Aunt Hetty
Maria said that.
"Don't do it," she repeated.  6 Clear fidget is the




DARK CLOSETS ANVD NEIGiiBOR-HIO USES.  93
worst thing you can give up to. It'll come back at
times when you can't satisfy yourself.  It's a way you
get into, and it'll follow you up. Don't get out of bed
to see if you have locked the door when you know
there isn't one chance in a hunclred that you haven't.
Don't pull your letter open to see if the money is safe
and right, when you know you had it in your hand to
put in and it can't be anywhere else. Don't keep
making crazy dives into your pocket and bags, to see
if your purse and your keys are there, after you've
started on your journey, and you can't help it if they
aint.  It's an awful habit, I tell you.  You'll go
back into actions and reasons and happenings, just so;
into trouble, and sickness, and death too.  Looking
after what never was in'emi; and doubting what you
know there certainly was. I tell you, for I know."
Aunt Hetty Maria had had troubles in her life, notwithstanding  the silk gown and the vwhite caps, and
the looking-up~to of all Dearwood. There were thilngs
she wasn't sure she hadn't made mistakes in, though
she was a woman who had always tried thoroughly to
do her duty. Perhaps in some other place I shall say




94       PATIENCE STBPOiG'S OUT2YGIS.
more of what I know about it. I understood enough
about it then, to feel that she spoke out of a cleep
place, and that the strong sense that advised me
against the "' clear fidgets" had had sore battles to
fight against them, before it stood up in her so, commanlcing them all down.
" If I had my life to live over again, there's no rule
I'd lay down for myself firmer.  And that's why I
speak to you."
As if I had my life to live- at thirty-eight!
And, yet - as if I hadn't!
I think, sometimes, we don't any of us find out how
to live till we have pretty well used up — spoiled,
perhaps - one life.
Did anybody ever knit a perfect stocking, right off,
at the first learning? Isn't the first experiment a taingle, more or less, of dropped stitches, run all through,
or twisted in the picking up; of puckers and stretches,
-unpremeditated and misplaced widenings out and
narrowings in?
Aren't there patient eyes over the needles, perhaps,
in our life-learnings?  Is all the yarn spoiled in con



DARIK CLOSETS AND 1NEIIGHBOR-TOUS-ES.  95
queriug the stitch?  Are we to woear our first poor
work, inevitably and always?  Or when, out of the
knowledge gained at it, we can accomplish a better,
shall it not be given us to do and to possess, and the
old puckers be quietly unravelled for us ancd laid away
out of our sight?
If mother and Aunt Hetty 3aria give me loving and
watchful counsel at thirty-eight, looking upon all these
years of mine as a mere " setting up," how will the
good angels, out of their deep eternity and its holy
wisdoms, look at theirs?
The very calm and beauty that sits upon them now,
— is it not the slmoothing out for a fair and glad beginning again?
" Don't gO back into the dark closets!"
It was a dear, bright word to me. Perhaps it is the
wvord that will be said to us in heaven, when we come
out into the light there that is fulfilling and absolving
love. Perhaps we shall be comforted and forgiven
beyond what we can think or hope.
Rose Noble came in this morning.




96       PA TIYECN C T ON'S8 0 UTiNGTS.
I think it is one of the comforts of not being very
rich people, that your friends talk out to you more, of
any little plans or perplexities they may have, and
with which money, as the world runs9 must necessarily
have so much to do.
Whether the oi0l dress is worth making over; what
sort of carpet wolild turn out the best and cheapest;
or, if the dress is quite worn out, or the caipet can't be
had,-the want and the way to bear it. They will
spealk of these things, which are the day's burden or
interest, sure of your sympathy; sure, also, that they
can, by no distant possibility, be seeming to dream of
anything else. It is the comfort the poor and tle
moderately well-off have together; and which the rich,
busy only with spending', or suspicious of wishfulness,
are shut out from.
I know so nmuch about Roose Noble and her mother;
it is quite as if their lives were adcled on to mine.
Lives that open into each other so are like houses with
a door between.
Isn't that an outing?
I think, all up and down the heavenly streets, they




DA1K CLOSi'TS AND NEIGHUBOR-HIO USES. 97
build their dwellings so. I think, from God unto "' the
least of these," spirits stand open, one to another, and
world to world. " I amn the Door," says the Lord.'"By me ye shall go in and out and find pasture."
" That they also may be one in us, as I in thee, and
thou in me."
I am glad to think we can begin it here.
I know all about them, — the Nobles; their plans
and their makings out; what Rose has done, and what
she has laid out for herself to do; and what the hope
of her life is, after that.
The hope began when she was teaching school in
western Ohio. She met Robert Haile there, a man
working with an object in his life as well; a debt to
pay back before he can begin to count for himself.
When he can do that, he will not be afraid to take a
wife and count for her also.
I said I knew all about Rose. That was true; as to
Robert, I don't know all; not quite all that she does;
and there is a something which Rose herself does not
fully know yet, but for which she waits till he shall
have it all to tell. He is thirty years old, and it is a
7




9 8      PATIEN CE ST RONG'S 0 UTINVCGS.
story of his early youth.  A  dark closet, perhaps,
where he did leave something smouldering.  But she is
not afraid.  She knows him as he is.
Rose has kept school ever since she was sixteen
years old; what she has determined to do before she
ever marries or   counts up" in any way for herself, is
to buy the little house for her mother that they live in
now. She has got three hundred dollars more to save
to do it. That doesn't seem much towards the price
of a house, but it is a little one, and she has saved it
all by fifties and hundreds, out of her school-keeping,
from year to year. In the mean while they have to
live; and things wear out; and Rose won't let them
grow too shabby, to spoil so the pretty idea of the
home she is working to keep for good and all.
So it was the sitting-room carpet that was worrying
her now.
" They are so dear, you see. It will cost forty-five
dollars. I don't talk to mother about it; I've come to
you. If I do make up my mind to get it, it must seem
easy, or she wouldn't take any comfort in it.  Patience, I wonder if there's always a prophecy in names!




DARK CLOSETS A-VD NEIGHBOR-HO USES.  99
There certainly was in yours; and in Emery Ann's;
how do you suppose mine happened? "
" Rose - Noble," I said, slowly; " why shouldn't it
have happened?"
I thought of her fresh, sweet nature, and of the
something deep and grand there is in it also, to which
the freshness and sweetness are a muere outward adding. The born namle, and the given name; they are
precisely as they should be.
"' It makes you think of the golden old times," said
Rose.  "Of the full pouches, and the princely givings.
I wish there were a magic in my name. I wish whenever it were spoken a real rose-noble might drop down.
Then I shouldn't have to count yards and shillings.
Then, you see,- 0 Patience, it might be nearly here,
the time we're waiting for!"
I saw that something more than common was on
Rose s mind.
I didn't want to ask; and I didn't want to interrupt,
if she chose to say more; so I sat silent.
" He might come this fall; his work is nearly done.
I think he will come. But I can't possibly be ready




100      PATIENCE STRONlG'S OUTINGS.
with my part. I must leave mother and Katie comfortable, and you see I do want lots of little things
myself, -besides the big ones.  Patience, - if it's
one ridiculous thing more than another, just this minute, - I'm such a goose, -it's- a band of back hair!"
I dlidn't think Rose was a goose.
I looked at her pretty head, with its bright hair, not
very long, - she had had a fever from over-work a year
and a half ago, and it had been cut short, - and so
fine that its real thickness hardly told; so that although
when she brushed it out it was light and full and shining, and looked ever so much, it would compress itself
with the least little twist, like a skein of floss, and
show for nothing.
I didn't blame her a bit, when other girls were wearing whole manufactures of hair-work that hardly let
the original foundation betray itself at all, as to what
it was or was not, for wishing just for a little more like
hers, to make the story good, as it was really meant to
bb, and might be, by and by. And Dr. Haile coming
before long, at least to see her.
And yet I do, on principle, hate false hair.




DAIK CLOSETS AND NEIGIIBOR-IiOUSES. 101
Only, it is a thing to wear now, as mlucl as caps or
bonnets; and everybody knows. Indeed, you hlave to
wear it instead of bonnets, or else look so scooped out.
I don't know where the line is. A great decal is bad
and frivolous and extravagant and worldly-minded;
but a little, -just what Rose Noble wanted to make
her head graceful and pretty, somewhat after the taste
of the time, - well, I give it up, as I have to give up
many puzzles; things that begin blamelessly enough,
but end all wrong, and carry the world by the ears
into all sorts of snarls.
Any way, I don't think Rose Noble was so very
silly. And I told her so.
But then, she couldn't spend ten dollars for it.
That ended the matter.
It was only a wish, given up to stronger andc dearer
claims.  If that were the settling of such points,
always! I suppose in that case, though, there would
be precious little back hair worn, except what grew.
And we should all look well enough.
I think, very likely, there are moral questions that
can't be generalized. Special decisions must make up




102      PATIVENCE STRONG'IS1 OUTNVGS.
the broad result and answer.  If everybody marks
their own inch, the line will be drawn all round the
world. Up and down, perhaps, like an isothermal;
but it will be tllere, as true as conscience or science
can make it.
That reminds me. I was thinking of that word,
" conscience," the other dlay. Of the "' con" of it.
" Together."  "G With."  Together with whom? What
makes consciene different fromn other knowing-? What
but God's knowledge joined to ours? The very contact of the human and Divine?
Rose Noble laughed, with a tear in her eye, at her
own silliness; but it was very pathetic to me. So
many "little things, — besides the big ones," were
wanting in her young life, of which other careless lives
were full.
I was quite sad about it after she had gone. I sat
still half an hour, thinking it over and over. Some
people had aunts ancl uncles, if not fathers ancl mothers, who could give them  the little embellishments
and opportunities of youth. Even I, more than half
as old again, and past caring for much, of these out



DARKi CLOSETS AND NEIGIBOR-HOUSES. 103
side things, had  Eliphalet  and  Gertrude to be
thoughtful for mne when it wouldn't do for me to be
thoughtful or wishful for myself; to give me a new pin
at Christmas, and a silk dress on a birthday, or when
they went shopping in New York; even to ask me —
if I hadn't broken my bones and blundered out of it -
to go to Europe with them.
I could think of so many people who wanted what
they couldn't possibly get, and nobody would be likely
to give thelm as longo as they lived. Mrs. Shreve, who
was "worrying through the summer" with an old
cooking-stove that spoiled all her cake, and wouldn't
heat her flat-irons; Mrs. Noble and Rose, wanting to
carpet their sitting-room and put new curtains in the
best bedroom; and obliged to choose between the two;
people poorer than these, with real suffering wants, all
around us; oh, what a wanting world it was!
I didn't know as outings into such a world, unless
one could go with Haroun Al Rasehid power, were
worth having, after all.
All att once, I caught myself up.' I never shall have a better chance!" I said, out




104     PA TIENCE STRONG'S OUTINVS.
loud. " Unless - something should happen that would
take the heart wholly out of everything. I. truly
believe I'm just about down-hearted enough."
And so I went and got the packet, which I had
fairly forgotten since I had been able to be about the
house.
It wasn't much to open; it was soon untied.
A little note from Eliphalet, and - two little common blue-covered books.
An account, opened at the Third National Bank of
Boston, with a deposit of three thousand dollars to the
credit of Patience Strong!
And a cheque-book, to draw the money out with.




INTO TIlE 3IEDDL ES.             10 5
IX.
INTO THE MIDDLES.
TIAT was nice of Eliphalet. And so knowing.  So
much better than a certificate of stock, to draw a dividend on twice a year, and never feel the full three
thousand dollars' worth of abundance unless I should
happen to live some eight or ten years longer, be
lucky in my shares, and keep a running account in my
head, in a "House that Jack built" fashion, of the
extra good it had done me. It was as much better as
fifty coppers, all one's own, to spend, used to be than
the rare silver half dollar given to " lay by."  It was
a clear piece of citron, to eat right up, instead of waiting for it in little bits, cooked and spoiledl, in the cake.
It is so delightful, once in a while, not to mind tihe
proper way, or be wise and prudent, but to be as foolish and happy and unproper as one pleases. Eliphalet
remembers old times, and knows that we don't out



106     -PA TEiENCE STROaVG'S 0 UTINVGS.
grow, but only overgrow, many things.  Especially
we wolmen.
1" It would have cost me that, and more," - the trip
to Europe for which I substituted my trip down the
trammel staircase, - so he wrote in his note. "1 Therefore, do just what you like with it. Invest it, come
out to Europe after us, or spend it all in gimp and
sugar-plums."
Now, then, couldn't I have outings?
Could I, thouLgh?  Just where I most wanted to
go? Into wishes and wants, - into hopes and troubles?
Into 1Mrs. Shreve's kitchen, with a new Perfect Rapture cooking-stove and a man to set it up?  Into Irrs.
Noble's parlor and bedroom, with carpet and curtains?
When I came to think of it, I'd got the lever, but I
wasn't so sure of a place to plant it, - without hurting
anybody.
Not right down on any qu-icek, tender pride, or delicate self-respect and independence.  That wouldn't
do.
I lmust take care that my dollars didn't get in my
way.




INTO THIE -MIDDLES.             107
First, I made mother solemnly promise never to
tell, -- until I did.
Then I laidl awake the best part of three nights,
plotting and planning.  Taking my share of the
world's skein to unravel; the how to make ends meet.
What everything and every soul is busy about, one
way andc another, from  the least to the Highest;
from the bringing together of the grub and the green
leaf to the lifting of men's souls up into the Heart of
God.
There is this and that; cottoll on one side of the
world, machines on the other, - coffee there, dry
goods and. iron and Yankee notions here; men, women
and children there, starved and overcrowded, -- work
and wide lands out here, and yndcler.
There are the homely 1" two ends, " income and outgo; there is money in poclkets, want in bodies and
souls; there is a wordl to say, and an ear straining
to hear it; the world is running round and round. It
-s in great and samall, grave and grotesque; the kitten
after its own tail; the baby trying to get its big toe
into its mouth; the mystic symbol of the serpent; the




108      PATIENCE STRONXCS OUTINGS.
planet wheeling round the sun; the fiery beauty of the
zodiac.
I think, what with planning and sleepiness, I was a
little feverish ancld confused perhaps; all these things
ran through my heard in. such curious associations.
Mly little bit was only this, - our side of the way
alcl over across; I and my bank-book here; the
Shreves and the Nobles, and their worries and puzzles
there. How should I get the two together?
I felt myself dreadfully outside, all at once, with my
three thousand dollars. HIow  should I get in, - I
who thought at first I had got tickets for everywhere?
Finally, and in the first place, I made up mly mind
that I must learn German. Rose Noble knew it, and
I didn't.
Out under the beeches in the old garden, while the
summer weather lasted; while Rose's school had long
vacation, and she was busy makirng pretty nightgowns
and unlder-robings.  I could help her whip and hem,
while I grated consonants between my tonsils, and
learned long sentences in which the nouns were centipedes and the verbs were nobody knows where. And




INTO THE M1IDDLES.              109
over the German and our needlework, we should grow
intimate, —more intimate than ever, —and I should find
some crafty and blessed way of " putting it," - the
rest of it, the little things and the big things, bit by
bit, - that even pride could not resist; that, in truth,
it could have nothing whatever, by any pretence, to do
with. It would be like a game of" solitaire,"- " patience," as they call it in the English novels; laying this
card carefully on that, looking through anda through
the position, catching my chances and my sequences,
and making it all out gloriously at last, with my king
and queen at top.
6' I feel as if it was my story," I said to mother, who
came into my room "' visiting."
I wonder if anybody else has that way of mother's
of talking about'" visiting "?
She conies in between her busy times, - while the
cake is baking, perhaps, or Emery Anin is sweeping
her room, or in the odd minutes before dinner, or the
twilight after tea, — and she sits down and says she
has come to " visit a little " with me.
They had that way at Dearwood, — the sisters in




110      PATIENCE STR O~G1' S OUTIdVgS.
the old house; Aunt Hetty Maria has it too; but it
doesn't sound so sweet from anybody as from-n mother.
She comes so close and so kindly; her visiting is
right into your thouchts and your heart.  It makes
me think of the "gentle visitings" I relmember in
some old hymn. I think that if she were gone away
out of the body, she would still Come and visit me so.' "Well, it is your story," she said to me in reply.
Y"ou're living right into it. You're putting yourself
into the middle of it. That's all that makes anything
our story. The. same story would be anybody's else
if they could stand where we do to look at it.  It's
the pleasantness of books, and -"' In the middle, — yes."   I interrupted  mother.
The word struck me. " God is in the middle. Everybody's story is his."
"'And it's the'joy' we' enter into,'" saidc mother,
finishing her sentence, and weaving in her word and
thought with mine,  " Isn't it? "
" Loving the neighbor as one's self. The fulfilling
of the whole law; the perfect rounding of the circle.
Standing in the middle, beside God. Self is oully the




INVTO THE MIDDLES.              111
centre-point. We can put it where we please. There
was' an angel standing in the sun.'"
Mother reached over and took up the Bible that was
on my little table.
" I wanted to see," she said, pleasantly, after she
had found the place. " Why, it's a kind of a wonder,
child! It comes like what we were saying."  And
then she read: —
"''ie cried out with a loud voice, saying to all the
fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather
yourselves together unto the supper of the great God.'
It fits right in, Patience."
"It always does come so, mother.  One part is
never put into my head, that the other doesn't fit right
on, and tell more. It fits to the old things too. It
shows the pattern they were all cut out to.' The
fowls that fly in the midst of heaven.' The living
knowledges and thoughts that go and come all through
the heavens and between all soulso The bird-meaning. You remember, mother?"
" That was the supper they couldn't come to who
were taken up with their own; their little bits of land,




112      PA TIEANCE STRONG'S OUTiNYGS.
and their wives, and their merchandise.  lBut out of
the highways and hedges they came.  Those who had
nothing.  It's the rich that can' hardly enter in.'"
"If they're in the'middle' of nothing but their
riches. Or their plans, or their pleasures, or their cleverness, or their prettiness.  Yes, it's the middle that
signifies. If you're in the wrong middle, move right
out of it; find a new one; they're all around; everything is a middle."
I went oil, thinking it out so, and brushing my hair.
Mother had come visiting while I was getting ready
for bed. They are clear little visiting times then;
then, ancd at the early morning, when we aie beginning
new together, and the first thing, is to find each other
for a minute.  It has been so ever since I was a little
child. I believe it will be so wvhen we begin new together by and by. The first thing will be to find each
other, - to look in each other's morning faces. Everything is a sign, and God will make it all conme true.




INTO TIlE S UI~SIIVNE.           113
X.
INTO TIE SUNSHINE.
IT was SO lovely this morning that we could not be
content even under the old beeches. It was a sort of
a truant clday.  Everything seemed to say, 1" Out!
further! "'One could rest in nothing, there was so
much all about and beyond. The beauty was like a
field of pasture fruit; it was impossible to stop to
pick, it spread so wide to lure you on. The whole
world was greedy with gladness. It was like the poorhouse boy, — only from  very fulness, not denial, —
sighing to itself and( forth into the broad air that held
it warmn: 6 More! more!"
The little grasses and late clovers; the leaves,
crisp and clean with dews and searching chemistries
of light, andr all alert with the spring that is in living
things; the tall, lithe stems of the young trees, and
the trunks of old ones mighty with their longer glad
8




114      PA TIENCE STR OVG'S OUTINVGS.
aspiring that was turned to solid strength; the glistening, restless clouds, the little winds of heaven like
happy breaths, - everything panted and stirred and
uplifted itself with an ecsta:sy that was at once replete
and insatiate. The globe itself seemed to revel in
blue space. It must needs roll on. One could almost
feel how it would be impossible to lie so at a still point
of bliss. The glad, golden orbit was accounted for.
Down the lane, the wild grape-vines had heaped up
banks of living green over the low, old wall; the
creepers tossed their grace and glory from  tree to
tree; the clematis was cloudy-white with blossom;
the ferns were plumy and fragrant in every little
angle; and the dear little life everlasting, with its
delicate, mystical odor, was plenty under foot. The
blackberries were full and sweet with their dark wine,
and the scent of the pines and the cedars came up to
meet you from the wood.
" We must go down there," said Rose.
" Shall we stop anywlhere?" said I.  " It's a day to
go and seek a summer-fortune."
So I picked up " Ahn" and the " Lesebuch," and




INTO THE SUVNSHINE.             115
we went down. Down into the cool and damp by the
brown brook; over and up, into the spicy stillness of
the evergreen pasture; close in, among the cedars,
against the'" shadow of the great rock."
The path brought, up here; or we might have walked
on until, -well, at least until some dusty turnpike
stopped us. The rock was better. It was the best
thing about this lane and wood-path that it had a
natural pause and end. I like an upshot. Else you
keep on, —with many other things as well as green
lanes, — till the turnpike runs across, and the green
wood shows its limits, and the beauty is all over.
I said a bit by heart, out of the " Lesebuch."
"Abraham basite einen altar." And I declined the
dreadful little German article that stickles so for all
its cases like any grown-up, significant word. And
then Rose told me a little about substantive declensions.
I began to see the fog. I knew I had not got into
it, so I held my peace. But I saw it was coming.
That is the reason it is so much harder for grown
people to learn a language, or any new thirg. A




116      PA TIEN~CE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
child just takes the one step set for him, never counting on, or thinking how many more there may be, or
what they have to do with each other. We grown-up
simpletons anticipate, analyze, and try to get hold of
the theory, and muddle our brains. Therefore, also,
we must become "as little children," to learn the
kingdom of heaven.
I' i'm not discouraged yet, Rose; but I wish to tell
you that I know it's there."
"What, discouragement? 9
" Yes; the climax of it; there's always a climax of
discouragement in everything.  When you get into
the thick of it, and can't see how, or if ever, you're
coming out. It's in a poem, or a story, or a sermon,
or a painting, or a piece of music, or a dress-fitting,
or a house-cleaning, or a living. It's always there;
and you've got to run against it, and have your tussle
with it.  Then, all at once, if you're blessed, you
come out of it, into the clear daylight, and wonder
where the dark was. It's the miracle worked in everything. It's the opening to the knocking. It's the
borllning,' as the little child said."




INTO TIlE SUNSHINE.              117
" That's a very true thing, Patience.  I'm  glad
you've said it. Only - I can't help wondering, once
in a while, if some people don't have to live all their
lives in a climax."
"' I never heard of but one person who did," said I,
" and that was MIr.!Micawber. And you know how it
was disposed of, simply enough, for him.'If he is
going to be continually arrested, his friends have just
got to be continually bailing him  out,' says Aunt
Betsy. Dickens put it in extreme, as his way is, but
he puts the very doctrine of heaven into it, - which is
also his way."
" Rose," I began again, after a mlinute or two, "'I
wish you and I had been children together; or else
that you were child enough now to believe in a fairy
story."
" Why? " asked Rose.
" Because then we should have got used to spending our coppers together, and dividing our nuts and
candies, and shouldn't think anything of it; and because I've got a kind of a fairy story to tell. Somebody gave me a nut, and I've cracked it; anl it's a




118     CPATIENCE STRONGr'S OUTIiNGS.
good deal too much for one. And fairy gifts don't
keep, you know. Rose, when you are married, I don't
mean to give you a silver flat-iron or watering-pot,
or - a parlor pitchfork and spoolrake —"
"What are you talking about?"'" Pitchforks?  Spoolrakes?  Why, the newest presents for brides, to be sure. Silver things to keep hung
up by your work-table, and round everywhere, to reach
after whatever tumbles down and rolls away just when
you want it, and where you can't get it; or for what is
out of arml's-length when you've got your lap full. If
they haven't got'elm yet, they will by that time.
They've invented everything else. I'm not going to
give you any of these things; and you've got your
grandmother's spoons. So I want, - instead, - it's a
fairy story, you see, - to go a day's shopping with
you, dear. Just one day. I want a real good outing,
you see; and besides that, my pocket's burnt all
through and through."
Where had all my beautiful craft gone to, and my
game of patience?
I couldn't help it; it was just like me; my heart




INTO THE SUNSIHINE.              119
and my pocket were burning; how could I wait till I
could say it in German, and Rose in a climax all the
while?
And besides that, I said before, it was a morning
of outings. The whole world was reaching, and giving, and asking, and brimful, and running over.
But the open-hearted day was on all sides. She
was touched and tuned with it, as well as I. She
wasn't " Rose Noble," either, for nothing.
Her face was sweet, and bright, and surprised, with
a thankful pleasure, as if some little sunshower had
fallen; and there was a high,, generous undelstanding
in her eyes.
And she said, simply: —' I can't refuse you the' more blessed' -ness, Pashie,
canl I?
It was all right, and very well; and the glad outgoiug day had made me do it, and fixed it all, a great
deal better than I could have planned. For there was
plenty to do, somehow, by and by.
When we came home we found Mrs. Shreve sitting
with mother. They had been laughing till there they
-LL —VJ J_~U~LNV InI VIR




120      PATIENCE STR OzNG'S OUTINGS.
both sat, wiping their spectacles. Mrs. Shreve was
quivering yet.
" Why, what is it, little mother?"
And so they told it over again. How Mrs. Shreve's
new, green Irish girl -" I shall always have a new
girl and a raw one, as long as I have my old stove,"
she said, as chipper as ever for all that - had been
found crying at the stairs. She didn't know how to
go up and down. She'd never learned on anything
but a ladder, at home, and had come straight from
shipboard.
It only shows," said mother, when we had got a
little over it again, " the things we do learn, without
realizing. We have to begin when we're babies, that's
certain."
"And we never know what we're laying up for,"
said'Mrs. Shreve. " I suppose it'll be so between this
world and the next, in things we never think of."
" In just this very thing," said I, seized suddenly
with the meaning.  "There are stairs between the
stories, - if'we knew how to use them."
(7 Spirits crying at the bottom, - and spirits crying




IN TO TIE S UNSHINE.             12 1
at the top, perhaps, and only the angels klibwing how
to go up and clown," said mother, gently.
I think," said 1Rose, " the stairs we learn on are
the stairs between the stories here, - between the
different human lives."' I knew I should get it out of you," said lMrs.
Shreve.  6' That's what I canme and told the story for.
I didn't know whacct it was, but I had a feeling of
something  in it, besides the fua. And you always
have the thing that's wanted, - cut and dried, and
bottled and labelled. There's always herbs and cordial
in this house, if everybody else is out."




12~2    _TPATIENCE STBONG'S OUTiNG1S.
Xi.
INTO THIE SHOPS.
NOBODY would believe what an excitement it was to
me, that day's going to Boston.
In the first place, I had not been away from home
before, except to go to church, since I broke my leg.
And then, almost anything, if you don't do it very
often, and if most times your days are taken up with
little busy, dutiful doings, makes a holiday, especially
if you are hearty and thorough about it.
People who live ten miles or so from the city, and
three-quarters of a mile out of the railway village,who don't keep any horses and carriages, and don't
spend money, usually, till they have thought at least
twice about it, - get the full good of going to Boston.
They begin over night.  They make their memorandum, and their calculations; these last to be upset
and twisted and reversed next day by shop experience




ILVTO THE SHIOPS.               123
and all the four parts of arithmetic, until, if it don't
end in wholly losing one's head, and gettiing a general
wild, reckless impression that one is simply absorbed
with one's purse, as a very helpless and inconsiderable
unit, voluntarily contributed, andc no more to be extricated, into the rush land whirl of that day's Washington Street, and that nothing will matter to anybody
but general results, - one may congratulate one's self
on rare presence of mind and tenacious individuality.
There is the silk, so much a yard, cost of importation,
-so many patterns in a piece, or a losing remnant, -
so much at retail to pay a reasonable profit to honorable trade, - one price at all the stores, -- what are
you going to do? All political economy ancd commuercial combination are against your simple-minded,
little back-parlor plans and reckonings of last night.
But I was beginning with the pleasantness; I didn't
mean to get into the craze. Solmetilmes you don't;
sometimes everything falls right in. It is all matchgrooved; you make all your connections; another
time everything is unhitched.
We had a smooth day, - Rose anid I; from  the




124      PATIEN1CE STRO VNG'S OUTINGS.
ride down the shady Old Road, in Farmer Graitt's
covered wagon, with our best bonnets on —(people
who go every day or two keep " Boston bonnets " of
a meaner sort; but if we didn't wear our best to
Boston, when should we wear it?) —to the coming
out at night, galvanized up to the arm-sizes with
watchful consciousness in  every little nerve  and
muscle of paper parcels various in shape and bullk,
never to be lost feeling of till they were got safely
home, and with only our elbows left to hold against
our pocket-plackets for fear of the picks.
The waysides were blue with the midsummer flowers
of the wild succory. The tanzy was getting golden
tops. There was a little savor of sea-saltness iln the
air, that just tingled the nostrils delicately, and made
a cordial of the light August wind. We met little
boys with bare feet and big baskets, going' up to the
pastures, berrying.  Round the railroad station were
gentlemen in summer trowsers and waistcoats and
straw  hats,  nnfolding  their morning papers; and
ladies alighting from carriages, giving each other fresh
morning greeting with fresh, bright faces.




INVTO TIE SHOPS.             125
What a pretty world it was,,-this side of it!
How easily the day began, and might run on, and
other days come after, just like this!
It was queer, though, to think of dear, good 3Mrs.
Shreve, at home with her raw girl, and her pesterinlg
stove, and her ironing, on this gay, free day. And
of people sick on beds, and people tired with nightwatching, and people hard at work in dusty little
shops, and mothers with arms full and houses waiting
to be put to morning rights, and all the worry and
ache and weariness that were surely about, somewhere. Only, people are so quiet about it!  The
world has learned to put up with so much! There are
the houses, in which such manifold cares of life are
going on, hushed, hanging no flag out, making no
sign; nobody rushing out at the doors to proclaim a
grievance, or protest against the careless comfort
riding by.
Yet the whole world lies open, skyward; and no
walls shut out the heavenly sight and ministering.
No place, even, is mean to the angels; they come and
bring their own glory with them.




126      PATIEVGiCE STROVNG'S OUTINGS.
This went through my mind, standing in the village waiting for the cars.  There was little stir
except what car-time made; and presently there
would be a rush and a shriek and a bustle, and then
in a minutes the still little place would be left to its
own stillness as if it had just died. And it gives up
the ghost so, every day.
It was something to be part of the ghost to-day.
To be one of these for whom the fuss was made, and
whorn the little boys looked after, leaning over the
bridge-rail; little boys, some of themn, who never
went to Boston in their lives; who stood at this end
always, seeing the people go and return, and knowing
that the great city lay at the further end of those two
iron lines that curved off into the little wood beside
the river.
Why, you can't move but you get so much to think
of. You are in a middle continually, whether you
will or no. It is spiritually and geometrically true.
The little birds sat on the telegraph wires. I wonder if they feel the thrill of the great words that run
under them along their perch; and if they fly off sud



INTO TIlE SHOPS.               127
denly to the woods to tell there what wonderful things'
are outside; or if they think the iron strings are spun
through the air on, purpose for them to roost on; and
if so, what their great-great-grandmothers did without
them?
iPerhaps we rest on spiritual lines as wonderful;
how do we know what quivers back and forth close
by us, - what unseen force is in each thread we cling
to?
There is a good deal in the spirit of things. It
was so in the beautiful out-doors, the other day, when
all things were giving and taking; it was so in the
shops this morning, when everybody was having and
spending.  It didn't seem so much for me to have the
silk mreasured off for Rose,-that we both decided
would. be so especially pretty for her,- as it would
have done if I had gone alone and bought it, and
brought it home with the formal parade of a present,
I let her pay in the street cars for both, with her
ready small change; and it was several times, for I
could not tax my weaker limb with too much walking




128      PATIEN~CE STRONYG'S OUTINGS.
about. And I let lher settle for the dinner checks at
Vinton's, while I finished my ice-cream.  I never
thanked  her, or took any notice; it was all for
granted  that we were out on a holiday together,
spending our coppers.
So she didn't mind, - so much, I mean, - when I
paid at Hovey's. And then I didn't give her time to
thinlk of anything, except whether I was going to
break my neck, or at least my leg again, as I plunged
across Summer Street amongst the teams and carriages, threading myself in and out against the back
wheels, and ran up into the carpet store.
"'You see it's your mother's turn now, Rose, so
hush up. I think, myself, it's the mothers that ought
to have the wedclding presents."
That was an inspiration.  Rose couldn't refuse for
her mother, and her mother couldn't refuse after IRose
had accepted. I never thought of it till that minute,
but it was one of the things that fayed right in, that
blessed day.
" I don't know," said Rose, with a kind of a gasp
in  her breath as she whispered, - for the carplet




INTO THE SHOPS.                129
gentleman had  met us now, at the head of the
stairs, -  but I feel as if I were going over Niagara
Falls."'" Precisely; so what have you to do with it?  It's
the river's lookout. Can you show us some smallfigured, ingrain  carpets, — bright colors, - brown,
with a little crimson, sir?"
I said it very glib, understanding myself perfectly,
which I don't always do - at the right minute - when
I go shopping. That's another difference in the days,
and the state of brain; the memorandums may be all
the same. I established the rapport directly, —between me and the salesman and the particular roll of
carpet that was there, amnong those walls of rolls, like
the statue in the marble. It is dreadful when a sort
of fo( comes over you just when you mean to make
your wishes plain, -  c distrust of the instant appreciation of your attendant, who, of course, in that case,
instantly does not appreciate. It is your faith that
fails; and so you stand before the mountain, -the'whole enormous stock in trade, - and nothing moves;
except, indeed, exactly the wrong things, which, if
9t




130      PATIENCE STROVNG'S OUTINVGS.
he's very obliging, he goes on with till you are ready
to cry because you can't possibly stop him.
Now, it was rolled right down, - the very thing
we had thought of and talked about; little bright,
brown leaves, and red berries, twisted together over a
mottled ground of quieter shades; well covered in the
pattern, and well knit in the weaving; good to sweep
and to wear, and lovely to look at.
"' We'll send the express for it to-lmorrow morning,"
said I; and I left Rose sitting on a carpet-roll while
I got away to the desk, to give the address and pay
the bill.
That hadn't seemed much either; we were suited
so quick, and there was so little chance for comparing
and counting up.
Afterward, we were in and out at Mudge's, and
Churchill & Watson's, and Holbrook's, -jolly and
reckless as two little drops in the rapids, that had
just as lief go anywhere now, among the rest, as how
couldc we help it once we had got in? And we made
up indiscriminate bundles together, she choosing, and
I choosing', and both paying., till I knew she would




INVTO THE SHItOP S.            131
never unravel the account of it, or know exactly how
she happened to get half of them, — the big thhings
and little. I didn't say anything about the two lace
collars, or the half-dozen  little  vine-embroidered
handkerchiefs, or the Balbriggan stockings, which
she didn't know were eighteen dollars the dozen, but
which I knew would be worth the money, and outlast
all the rest she was buying.  What business had she
to interfere with my part of the parcels?
I never felt so bright, and so wicked, and so wise,
and heart-happy, in all mny life.
I couldn't smuggle in the " back hair" among the
dry goods, so I took her deliberately away to West
Street, among the waterfalls, andC, -I can't. think of
any other word, - I' boosted" up her conscience to
buy.
" If it wasn't more than six dollars, -just a little
one, — pe7rhas   she would."
And so we went in.
I had been there last winter with Aunt Hetty
Maria, to get a frizette, so I felt as if I knew the
Pt1an. When you don't buy a thing more than once




132      PATIENCE STRONG'S G-'TIN~GS~.
in a dozen years, it seems as if it stood out among the
seller's transactions as it does among your own. At
any rate, I knew them all well enough to-clay. I felt
intimiate and privileged everywhere; for I had, — or
had had,- a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket,
and twenty-eight hundred and fifty more at home, in
the blue book.




J.TO  THE YEARS.                 133
XII.
INTO THE YEARS.
ROSE was as shamefaced over the box of bands as
if the man were used to blushes.
Of course there was nothing for six  dollars, —
scarcely for ten or twelve; though at last, finding that
the law of increase in price was more accordcing to the
inch or two difference in lengths, than to the thickness,
I matched the bright chestnut tint of the head that
bent itself so mutely above the counter of falsities, with
a soft, full fall of hair, not quite so fine or quite so long
as those we had been looking at, but bright as Rose's
own, and which the dealer said he would let us have
for eleven dollars.  "'And cheap, too, for the shade
everybody's wearing."
Rose lifted her head, and moved the box slightly from
her. "6 You see it is no use," she said, "' and perhaps
it is just as well."




134     PATIENCE STROXGV'S OUTINVGS.
But I was so determined that day upon my wickedness.
I put the hair into her hand.
" See," said I, " the color is perfect, — better than
those long ones. And I think we can come to some
agreement. We are country ladies," I observed persuasively and confidentially to the hair-merchant, "' and
expect to make bargains, you know."
Meanwhile I had got out a five-dollar bill. I could
have picked Rose's pocket, let alone my own, for all
she would have noticed about it. Her head was down
again. She didn't know what to do with the band of
hair, or how to get rid of it.' believe she was getting
vexed with me.
I held up the five-dollar note over her shoulder,
between my thumbs and fingffers. I nodded to the iman.
" Call it six dollars," said I, as bold as Jack the
Giant-Killer.  "That was the price she had made up
her mind to."
The man's eyes looked funny for a minute, between
growing big suddenly and then twinlkling.  I don't
think he ever had such extraordinary customers before.




INTO THE YEARS.                135
"Well, — it is anl odd length, — and wove in the
old style, flat, - if it suits you, I'll call it six; though
it's low, very low; and I shouldn't like the price to be
told of."
No danger of Rose displaying her bargain, which
she was so ashamed to make.
I took the thing from her, and gave it to the shopman to be put up; and with it, I tucked the five dollars
into his hand.
She got out her little porte-monnaie, and paid the
six; and that's all she knows about it to this day.
I have about come to the conclusion that - once in
a great while - even a good, well-meaning action is all
the more enljoyable if you have to put a little spice of
iniquity into it.
Rose was very still, riding up that evening, in Farmer Graitt's wagon. Things seemed to be coming over
her all at once with a sort of realizing sense. -  Te
had got out of the city whirl into the calm country
again.
When she got down at her own gate and bade me
good-night she saidc:




1.36     PA TIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
" I don't half know what has possessed me to-day,
Patience. What will mother say to it all?"
It was the naughty child coming home after the fun
was over.' Never you mind, Rosy," said I, as hardened as
ever. ^ 6Don't tell her everything all at once.  I'll
come across to-morrow morning, and bear all the blame.
And help make the carpeto"
The next day was my birthday. I have got into a
way of having birthdays lately. They always used to
come, once in a while, but nowadays the whiles are
shorter.
There was more than a plenty of time between them
once; I got quite tired of being eight years old, I remember, before the clday came when I could say I was
nine; and I was thoroughly used to calling myself fifteen before the dignity of sixteen was laid upon me.
I was in no danger, then, of forgetting my age.
There was a real mile between each two milestones.
I travelled in a coach and four in those days; I could
see the wheels go round, and count the little flowers by




INTO  THE   YEARS.             137
thel wayside. At some point or other, unperceived of
me, they took off the horses, and put on steam; and
now, whiz! the milestones flash by me, till life seems
sometimes nothing but a post and rail fence.
There is, really, such a thing as an "6 uncertain" age.
It is a solelmn fact that the time comes when you have
to stop and calculate before you can tell the truth.
Whlly it is quite hard enough to remember the year of
our Lord, - at least between January and July. No
wonder they make a festival of the world's birthday.
They have to. It is a mere practical necessity. Without it, the very planet would lose count and go adrift,
like any other spinster. I hardly got used to 1867 before 1868 came; indeed, it seems queer still that we
are in the sixties at all. I Irealize nothing farther down
than the forties. The rest seems tacked on in a hurry.
The years are as if they had been gathered before they
were ripe; or like what I was talking about the other
day, -the machine stitches that your don't have the
comfort of as stitches; the first thing you know, you've
got a seam.
That brings me back to this very, blessed birthday




138      PATIENC~E STRONCr'S O UTIZGNS.
of mine, - my thirty-ninth. There was another seam
done, -I had only got to join off, -and I meant to
have a holiday. I gave myself my own treat. I tyrannized over my little mother, and made her give up
everything she had thought of, - the special raspberryroll for dinner and the iced-cake for tea,- the making
of them at least, that she was going to help Emery Ann
with; - and come over with me, picnicing and carpetsewing at the Nobles'. Emery Ann could make the
raspberry-roll alone, and bring it after us at twelve
o'clock.
We have a fashion round in our little neighborhood,
— the Shreves, and the Nobles, and we, - of picnic
visits. We did it before great surprise parties were invented. We would take our pie and our knitting-work,
and " run in." It is a nice way. Especially if you choose
a day when you know that the girl is gone, or any little
domestic enterprise out of the cooking line, and adverse
to' it, is afoot; your knitting-work is nothing to lay by,
you know; and you are running breadths, or setting
iup china before anybody' notices; and the pie or the
roasted ducks come in so "' pleasant and unexpected"




INTO THE YEARS.                139
at the end. For it is an understood point that though
you bring a basket as big as a baby's wagon, and only
produce four needlee and a ball of yarn to account for
it, and though everybody has to walk round it and over
it twenty times, it shall be an utterly invisible and
spiritual presence till the surprise comes out of it.
I killed two birds to-day; or I made two knots in
the end of my seam.
I had something all ready in my pocket for Dickie
Shreve; that is, for his mother, only she wouldn't know
it. It was really a cooking-stove; but in fairy dealings, - which are all that can come of a fairy gift, -
you never know exactly what you have or handle.
WVhat I appeared to take out of my pocket and give
to Dickie Shreve that morning — it happened nicely
" by the way" as I meant it should, for we met him as
we went across - was a year's railway ticket.
I-Ie was'going to enter the School of Technology in
September; and I expected to make a little expressman of him in his trips to and from the city. I told
him so; that I should have books from Loring's, and
things fi'om dry-goods stores, and Briogham's rolls, and




1.40     PATIENCE S1J0TONG'S OUTINVGS.
letters to post, and cheques to cash, and bills to pay,
and worsteds to match, all winter long; so he needn't
be obliged; he didn't know yet what he was coming to.
I had limade up my mind to have a claim upon him, and
he would be tired enough of his bargain before he got
through.
Season tickets arce pretty dear on our branch, and I
knew it would make the difference of the cookingstove, and more, in IMrs. Shreve's plans.  I saw a new
suit of clothes in the perspective of Dick's eyes, as I
snubbed him up in his thanks and sent him off.
The carpet arrived at Mrs. Noble's just as we did;
and she didn't know which to let in first. Gammel
was in a hurry, and the great roll was right in the doorway, and so weie we. There were so many counterexcitements, and it was so exactly as bad for us as for
her, blundering right upon this particular moment, that
everything was got over wifthout being really done at
all; giving and taking, and blaming and thanking, and
walking in and making welcome. 3Mrs. Noble never
got farther, or clearer, than: --' We1ll, I never didc! Rose said -- but I couldn't




INV TO THIE YEAR S.            141
have believed -- what could possess you? I don't know
a thing to say,- I haven't got a single word. Come
right in, and lay off your things. I'm right down glad
to see you, at any rate."
We hadn't anything to lay off but parasols, and
then we all fell to cutting the cords and pulling away
the heavy paper, and letting out the bright lengths
over the floor.
" Well, who would?" began Mrs. Noble again. 6 I
do declare, it's perfectly elegant! And I can't say a
single word! " She was as sure of this as any speechmaker, and went on accor(lingly. " Why, you could
most pick up those leaves, especially thle light-shaded
ones, - those maple-yellows. They look so raised.
And it's such a good mixed ground; and the pattern
all wove in so close and firm. Why, there won't be a
pocket in it when it wears.; and it never will wear.
It'll turn over, and end for end, and any way. Well,
there, - I haven't got a word!"
Sure enough, now she hadn't. She had said it till
it had come true.
Wle had a beautiful time, cutting, and miatching, and




142      PA TIEXCE ST ONe'S OTTINV~rS.
sewing; only there wasn't half enough to do. There
were only five long seams for four of us; tnd the ends
to catch-stitch down, and the short pieces to put on for
the side windows by the chimney. By the time Emery
Ann and the raspberry roll came, we had got all
through, and had spread it out and were walking on it.
" You might rake'em up, all into one corner, they're
so natural," Mrs. Noble began over again. " I shouldn't
ever have lit on it.  They'd have sold me some old
thing in squares, or eggs, or diamonds. I'm so oldfashioned looking, you see; they keep things laid by
for old women and out West. And you can't show'em
half you know, - that is, if you're at all polite. Paper
hangings and carpets are the biggest trials to buy;
I'd as lief be fed with a spoon."
It was such a real, good time.  It was one of the
best birthdays I had almost ever hadl, —this last of
the thirties.
It was one of the life-outings; one that might have
been hard and regretful, but filled brimful of sunshiny
pleasantness for me to remember it always by.
I shan't be a bit afraid to go clear out — into forty.




INTO THE NEW TESTAlMEiVT PART OF IT. 143
XIII.
INTO THE NEW TESTAMENT PART OF IT.
MOTHER'S birthday is just a fortnight after mine.
For a little while, so, I feel, - after a fashion, - the
oldest. At any rate, I am always her oldest child,
and she is my youngest mother; for the mother is as
many  in her family,- separately and specially to
each, - as God is in his world.
WVe are both in one month; the beautiful September.
My day is the very first, anad hers is the fifteenth. I
hBve the earliest touch of the autumn time upon me,
and she is in the middle beauty.
For just these two weeks, we can pretend to count a
whole year less of difference.
She tells me of those happy two weeks, of which the
reminder is like a long birthday joy, reaching from
mine to hers, and making it holy and beautiful all between; when she was not quite eighteen and I had




144      TATJENVCE STROYNG'S  OUTINVGS.
come to belong to all the rest of her life, for always
and always. I enter so into what it must have been
for her, that it is as if 1, too, had known motherhood.
All nmutual relations are like reflected  rainbows.
The first is straight from the sun; but the second is
over against it and like unto it; and the one light is in
them all.
We almost always make some plan that links our
birthdays together and keeps them as one. We take
the fortnight to do something pretty and extra for the
house, beginning on my day, and finishing andc setting
up on hers; or we go to Dearwood, or to Boston,to Eliphalet's, taking the pleasantness of the plan anci
the starting and anticipation for me, and the better
pleasantness of the home-comiing for her; and lay up
thirteen days of things to talk over all winter, between.
Or we have somebody to stay with us, and keep simple
festival; without t7leir knowing why, perhaps.
This time our hearts were in the salne thing, —
Rose Noble's little wedding havings; we had got into
the middle of those. I had almost made the child believe -that she might go on with what she knew she




INTO THE NETV TESTAMENT PAiROT OF IT. 14
could do herself, and leave the rest to Providence, that
had begun to bring things to bear, and was setting a
hope for the bright October in both their hearts that
would never be let to come quite to nought.
As for the school, Katie was to keep it up now,
whenever she left it; so that made no difference.
And there was something I had got it into my head
to do, that I could do best by way of helping Rose.
What would become of me if I had, - what does become of people, I wonder, who have, - thirty, or three
hundred thousand to do with and to account for? My
outings crowd so with these three thousand opportunities of mine. For I mean to spend them every one
somehow; and put out what they get at interest. I
shall have it all my life to be glad of; and the gladness of it shall be growing in other lives. Bank interest isn't the only interest, even in common, selfish
money-using. A  man failed and they took all his
money away; that was all they could find though; he
said he'd had forty years of good living, and they
couldn't touch that.
How can I tell that I should be here to use it as it
10




146      PA TI. ENCE STRONG'S 0 UTINVGS.
came, - the little income, — twe or three hundred a
year?  Or that some trouble of ours should not claim
it, or sweep it all away?  Or that I ehould keep my
good mind even, and do with it the best it oeuld do,
and not be tempted too much, here and there, in my
own living and having?
Of course I could fix it somehow, to all probability;
I could endow, or bequeath; but I believe so in that
other, living, interest, better than the dollars that grow
out of dollars, and can only do dollars' worth as they
come, after all. Nothing stops; percentage is only
the sign of a realer thing. The box of ointment might
have been turned into three hundred pence, and doled
out here and there; but it was all poured on Jesus'
head; and the perfume of it has come down into the
whole world, and the years of our Lord, and has filled
this room of the Father full.
I have got Seelie Rubb on my hands now. Of
course. Why are we shown first one thing, and then
another?  First blue books full of money-orders; and
then Seelie Rubbs, - if we're not to put this and that
together?




INTO THtE NEW TESTAIVEIVT PART OF IT. 147
Why shouldn't I spell after the Lord as fast as he
puts his finger on the letters?  Dollars —or any
gifts- are only illuminated initials; the shine of
them is only the leading to what comes next; all the
little plain black print that joins the meaning on.
Seelie PRubb's little pale face and tired figure didn't
stop under the locusts, and look over into our sideyard that very next Monday when I was shaking my
duster out of the parlor window, without coming into
my parsing and spelling. Everybody must study their
own primer.
" Won't you come in?" said I.' You've had a
long walk from the village."
She looked surprised. She had never been into our
house in her life. She had come by twenty houses
that morning that she had never been into.
The door stood open, and I went round and stepped
out on the porch. She turned in at the gate, to answer me civilly within earshot.
" I don't know, -I guess not, - I'm  very much
obliged; I was out for a little fresh air. It's so different in the village, you see."




148      PATIENCE STBONG'S OUTINGS.
"' Come right in, and have a glass of milk, Seelie.
That's different in the village too."
I brought her some morning's milk,- we always
set away one or two tumblers to cream over for drinking; you get the sweet top-flavor all through, so,and a slice of mother's sponge cake on a plate.
"~ Why, you're very kind," said Seelie, simply. " I
don't know as I ought to let you take the trouble.
I-low pleasant it is here!"
She sat by the west window, up which the creepers
came, and beyond which was the chestnut shade. It
was different from Miss Widger's little shop, where
she sat and worked at dress-making, and where a geranium pot and a great white cat with pink bows in its
ears filled up the window-seat, and the dust of the
street came drifting in.
" If shops didn't only have to be in villages! " Seelie said.' Yes, if'work could all be done in the pleasant
green places! I think of that, sometimes, in the village and in town. How the work of the world overlays the world, and blots the color of it out. How




INTO THE NEW TESTAMENT PART OF IT. 149
men come with their mills and their blacksmithaing into
the woods by the rivers, and how other things have to
come after, till everything is gravelled and planked
and bricked and crowded up, and the beauty is buried,
and a stone put over it. And yet the sweet earth with
the seeds in it is underneath all the while, and the
blue and the clouds are overhead, and it's always a
place that mzight be, and that there are some scraps
left of, — trees and water - and grass blades coming
up between the bricks, - after all."
" If it was only the planks and the dust," said Seelie. "But it's getting pretty bad lately with Badsham's smoke, since he set the new chimneys going.
They come right up out of the hollow, and so just send
that yellow choke into our windows. Once or twice
every clay, —when they fire up or something, -- its
dreadfal. It's bad for mother, too, since she had the
pleurisy. Oh, it's another world the minute you get
this side of the hill!"
I know how that is. I know how the woods and
pastures meet you with their sweet breath, as you
come down just ever so little over the crown.




150      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTI~NGS.' You're not busy now,- then? The fall work hasls't
come in much?"
" No. Miss Wicdger won't want me till about the
twentieth. I wish she did. Then the fall hurry begins. I've been out, now, since the second week in
August. I meant to have gone down East to my
uncle's, for a vacation, but mother hasn't been well. I
wish I could get her up here. It would do her a sight
of good to come up and breathe a little. But she
couldn't ever walk so far."
Green pastures and still waters! Wlhat that promise must be to so many!
I sent some sponge cake and some pears to Seelie's
mother, and the rest of that day I thought it over, --
till it fayed in.
" That's off my mind! " said mother, putting away
the week's mending, and turning the stocking-basket
bottom up.
"I don't know as there's' any particular good in
that," said Emery Ann. " Something else'll be onto




INTO TIHE VNE V TESTAXiIEYVT PAR T OF IT. 151
it again, directly. I've spent all my life inl getting
things off my minhd."
" Well, that's it," said I.' That's living."
"Seelms so," said Emery Ann, and went out of the
room.
" fother, I want to do something rather queer," I
began, as soon as she had gone.; I've been thinking
of it these two dclays. It's on my mind."'"Well, childie?" said mother, with faith and patience in her voice.
I didn't want to try them too far. She mightn't
altogether like it, and quite reasonably.
" Would you mind?   Would you think  it very
queer?  I've looked at it till I can't tell. It's as
straight as can be in a New Testament light."'I hope nmy spectacles won't make it crooked then,"
said mother. As if she ever crooked anything!
"It's the Rubbs; Seelie and her mother.  You
know Seelie, in BMiss Wicdger's little shop?  The very
thing that makes it queer is the New Testament part
of it.'"
BMother smoothed her gown over her lap, and said




152      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTIZCWS.
nothing; waiting quietly for me to end my shying
about, and come to the New Testament part of it.
She smoothed her gown down so, when she was
ready and attentive; when she had put her own affairs
out of her thought for the minute, and waited to take
in somebody's else; just as she might lay her work
out of her hands, and smooth her lap to take a child
up, and hear what it had got to say. I could talk out
fieer when it came to this pleasant sign of hers.
" I want to ask them right up here, mother, for a
while. They're strangers, but I'd like to take them
in. That's the queerness, - and the other part."
Then I went on, braver.
"You  see they're choked out with Badshaum's
smoke. And Seelie got tired with her hot-weather
Work, and never got rested; her mother's been sick.
And she crawls up here for a breath of pasture air,and can't take it home to her mother in a basket.
And it fits all round, as the right piece always does.
Rose has got her dress-making to do, and we meant
to help her along at any rate; and Seelie can measure
and baste her here at home, and save her ever so much




INTO TIHE lEW TESTAiMENT PART OF IT. 15.3
hindrance;  and we can all be together, — all the
birthday-time, motherdie, - in such a satisfaction! "
"~ Well, dearie, I see the New Testament part of it;
but where's the queerness? "
And the darling little woman smoothed out her lap
again, motherly and welcoming, and her face opened
itself like the daylight, and-I couldn't see the queerness myself, now. It had all come into place, a part
of the things that are; tile settled things, that in a
minute are no longer strange, but get an old look
di'ectly, as if they had been from  the beginning.
I've got to skip over this fortnight, pretty much; I
wish I hadn't. There was ever so much in it. Rose's
pretty work, which Seelie said was a rest itself, after
the fineries of mill-girls and servants; and the walks
down the lane, and in the garden; and Mrs. Rubb's
talks about down East, and their happy dclays, and
their troubles, and their moving, and how they had
been " put to it" to get on here; and Emery Ann's
nice breakfasts,- and dinners, and teas; and  Mrs.
Rubb's noticing of our old-fashionecl backgammon
table in the corner, —so odd and so handsome, —




154      PATIENCE STROIVN'S OUTINGS.
that swivelled round and opened over, and had the
little side cribs for the men and boxes, and was so
pretty with the inlaying of two-colored woods; and
mother finding out that she knew how, and was so
fond of it, and used to play so much, only their board
got broken first, and then lost in the moving; and
their games together in blind man's holidays; and
everything seeming so natural, as if they might have
been friends or cousins, instead of strange people out
of the village; and Mrs. Rubb's saying that there
was' one more beautiful place in the world, and she
shouldn't ever lose it nor forget it; " and their going
home in Farmer Graitt's wagon, with some of Emery
Ann's bread, and mother's cake, and a pair of roasted
chickens, because their fire had been out for ten days;
and a big basket of pears, and Porter apples, and
tomatoes, and some Hubbard squashes under the seat,
because we had more than we knew what to do with;
and best of all with a color in Seelie's cheeks, and a
look in both their faces, as if it was glad and worth
while again to be alive.
This was the between-time; but I had something




INTO THFE NEW TESTAMENT PART OF IT. 155
kept back still, for the real birthday, when mother was
her dear, bright fifty-seven.
I took her to walk in the warm sunset, - we were
having beautiful days, and great, ripe harvest moons,
— and we went away through the cedar woods till we
came out on the Edge Rock, where our land ended,
and a piece came in cornerwise, up out of the hollow,
- a beautiful little piece, three acres and a half or so,
of oak and maple woodland, - opening out on the
other side upon the little twist of cross-road, and
squaring so with our own boundaries further up.
Mother never cares to own things, — just for owning; but some time or other the old home-place would
be Eliphalet's; and men like things square and shipshape; she knew he'd think of it by and by, and she'd
often been half a mind to speak about it; but she'd
rather buy  it herself, if it should ever come convenient; and I knew she would like to call it hers a
little while, too, for she always loved this rock, and
the beautiful, billowy outlook over the trees, and she
had memories with it.
Now, this land was Rose Noble's; a part of what




156     PATIENCE STRONGi'S OUTINGYS.
her father left her, separate from the old farml which
was sold out in the early days of their trouble, and
nobody had wanted it enough to give a good value for
it, or it would probably have gone after the rest long
ago; so they had sold some wood, and paid the taxes,
and Rose laughed about her "' real estate."
The other day, I bought it of her in mother's name,
giving her four hundred and twenty-five dollars. And
to-night I had the deed in my pocket; and while we
stood there on the Edge Rock, and the maples were
splendid in the sunshafts that shot through their
bosoms and showed the first gleams of their ripening
glory, -- while everything was at its prettiest, and
mother was saying, as she always did when she stood
here, that there wasn't another spot on the whole farm
like it, —I put the paper in her hand, and told her
that the Little Red Wood-lot was her birthday gift.




INTO GOD'S TREYASURE-BOX.           157
XIV.
INTO GOD S TREASURE-BOX.
I'mI sure I didn't begin to know what I was undertaking when I set out to wriite down about the Outings.
Why, there is no end to them! They are the forever-beginnings. The very flow of the river of water
of life, that cometh out of the Throne. To say all
about them  would be to make a Bible, or a world.
Even all of them that there is in the very quietest
life; for each touches and takes fast hold of the whole.
Besides the think-outings, and clthe do-outings, and the
give-outings, - which are life and love, and some
simple shape of which we every one must discover in
ourselves, - there are the come-outings, and the findoutings, and the grow-outings, and the turn-outings -
which are the wonderful gift and dealing and disclosure and providence of God, in and for and about




158      PATIENCE STRONGC'S O UTINGS.
us. It was for Life the Lord bade us  "Watch I" Not
for death and doom. It is to Life we are blind and
unconscious; not knowing what hour Hle doth come.
It was a little thing,- to tell of after words like
these, - that made me think of this so, just now.
It was a finding-out of myself. I have painted a
little picture.
I didn't know  as I could. I learned something
about it years ago, at school, as all the girls did; just
as I learned a little music, and left off practising
gradually, after cares came and kept me busy, and the
old piano gave out, and everybody's else had an
octave and a half more, and the new, beautiful music
was all written for the grand instruments. Besides
which, after Aunt Judith came she couldn't bear the
noise.
I think I always noticed lines and shades, and had
an eye for what was true and in symmetry.  And
somehow it must have'been " mulling" quietly in me,
as a lesson does, learned over night and slept upon;
gathering to itself little hints here and there, unconsciously; training and unfolding a possibility that




INTO GOD'S TTEASURE-BOX.             159
sometime should come to the light suddenly. I suppose I never darned a stocking, or shaped the curves
of a dress, or looped up a window-curtain, or, more
than all, set delicate flower-stems in branching harmony, and made their bright tints lie against each
other in the accord of color, so as to spell the meaning meant, without this art-instinct which is the translation of heavenly language, catchiang insensibly and
laying up some new and beautiful phrase.
I suppose that eye and touch and feeling are all
educated, by the commonest, teasing little every-day
things; the trying to fit things and lay them straight;
the making'of beds; the setting of tables.
I suppose an orderly room, when we ma7ce the order,
and hlave to study how, teaches a lesson in grouping
and perspective, and Heaven only knows what more.
That one cannot trim a bonnet without learning truths
of lines and contrasts; that doing any one thing well
-even setting stitches and plaiting frills — puts a
key into one's hand to the opening of some other quite
different secret; and that we can never know  what
may be to come out of the meanest drudgery.




160     PATIENCE STROOGa'S OUTINGS.
Tho Lord hides away the seeds of wonderful, joyful
life in us; and we sleep and wake, night and day;
and they spring up and grow, we know not how.
At any rate, something put it into my head all at
once that I should like to try to mcake the beautiful
lines and touches that I studied every day in a certain
little copy of Ellenreider's lovely cherub-picture of
the " Gloria in Excelsis."  Gertrude lent it to me
when she went away, to hang in my room; and I have
looked at it, and into it, ever since, until it has seemed
to grow into my mind and apprehension, and become
a real possession; as if I could put mny finger right
upon it anywhere, - on any secret of its beauty.
So now that I was rich, and could afford to try experiments, I went one day and bought paints and
brushes, and a little square of canvas which I brought
home and set up on a shelf, and looked at, wondering
if there would ever be anything on it; if the little
face and wings would really grow there upon the
blank priming; and the beautiful meaning shine out
at me.
And, without my knowing how, or whether I could




INTO GOD'S TREASURE-BOX.             161
ever do it again, it has; and I have got the "1 Gloria
in Excelsis" for my very own.
I have a feeling that I could do other things in the
same way; thateverything is linked together; that
music and sculpture would come; and that it is not so
bad a matter, after all, that we seem to get a glimpse
of the many things, and scarcely to achieve the one,
in these short lives of ours; since that in the little we
are so surely laying hold of the much; and that, in
our few and tiny steps upon the earth, we do draw the
great globe itself toward us, with all its wealths, in
every footfall.
We know not, verily, that which is laid up for us.
There are such beautiful things put by. In God's
house, and in God's time, there are such treasures. It
comes true so, what I wished once when I was a little
girl, and mother gave me some things out of an old
trunk I watched her looking over. " If I could only
have great boxes full of things saved up to pick out
from always  "
The kingdom of heaven is like unto a householder.
It has made me very glad, - with a new and large
11




162      PATIENVCE STRONG'S OUTlZVGS.
forth-looking and expectance, —just the painting of
this little picture.
I have got a little easel now, in my window, and
mother sits by, knitting, while I paint. I am doing
autumn leaves, to burn upon the walls inside when the
outside blaze is over. I have got the gold-brown of
the hickory, and the deep bronze of the ash, and the
amber and flame of the maple, and the shining crimson of the oak; and I am grouping them  together,
and unravelling their marvellous interweavings of
glorious color, and mlatching and mocking them with
umber and carmine, and sienna and vermilion; and
finding one speech in the dead minerals and in the
living leaves.
Mother is so pleased.
But her pleasure gets a meaning in it, now and then,
that makes it seem a sadness to me.
I catch her thought so quickly; before she has fairly
got it herself, she says sometimes.  We do understand each other almost too well.
It is in her face, " Yes; one thing more, to fill up
life, and to satisfy; if the lonely days should come."




INTO COD'S TREASUR E-BOX.            163
Against this look, I thrust, the other day, a sudden
word of blank diversion.
" 3Motherdie! What is, - mostly, - in Aunt Hetty
laria's dclark closet, I wonder?"
I had been promising myself a talk about this, a
long while.
" John Halliday."
I had been forgetting John Halliday these ten years.
I never knew him much. He was ten years younger
than I, and he came to Dearwood when he was seven
or eight years old, and I was out of my childhood
then, and had left off making the long play-visits in
which I should have come to know  and care about
him.  Our btusy and troubled days at home-with
Aunt Judith and father —began not very long after
that, and I only heard a little bit here and there of
what went on between Jack, as she called him, and
ly Aunt Iletty Maria.
I-He was away at school some years, and then at college; and then I know he went to Germany, - to
study professionally, they said; and that he disappointed her and worried her somehow; and she was




164      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTLNGVS.
pretty strict with him, even in her way of doing everything for him; at any rate, that they didn't get on
together, and that she stopped him short at last, suddenly, and called him home; but that he went away
somewhere again, soon after, and had never come back
to her; and that there had been a cloud, as it were,
behind her, in the lengthening years, which she was
afraid to turn and look back at.  Without really
knowing anything, or ever before asking a word, I had
felt this about Aunt Hetty Maria; so that I understood what she meant when she said, that day, - " I
tell you for I know;" and I was not a bit surprised at
mother's answer of the simple name: —
" John Halliday."
" What did Jack do, exactly, mother?"
"Well, it wasn't so much, perhaps, what he did do,
as what he didn't; and your Aunt Hetty IMaria, —
well, she's as good a woman, you know, as ever grew,
- except, indeed, it may be the missionaries, -but
there! some people haven't any whiskers, and it's no
use.'
" Whiskers! mother!"




INYTO GOD'S T~REYASUPRE-BOXY.        165
6'Yes; I've thought a good many times that half
the troubles in the world came of that. There's two
kinds, you see, besides the cats'; outside and inside
ones, -and if people don't have them, why, they're
forever knocking their elbows, and breaking, the noses
off their pitchers, and tearing their sleeves on doorlatches, and undertaking things generally that they
can't get through with. Your Aunt H-etty Maria was
always rather apt to try to get through holes, -
and put other people through, —that she hadn't
measured.' Jack came there when his mother died, - Mr
Parmenter's only, dear sister; and Aunt Hetty Maria
never had a boy, and he grew up to be just like their
own; but she was always strict in her ways, and more
than all - if people only knew it - upon herself.  She
never would half' let on,' as Emery Ann says, what
she cared for anybody. And then little Mabel died,
and Jack was all; and then she held him tighter than
ever, in a queer way. She did everything, and let
him have everything, really, only somehow, she took
the clear comfort out of it, she was so afraid of his




166      PA7'ZIENCE STRON'TS OUTfYGS.
being spoiled. She gave him a good piece of cloth,
and a long threadl; only she put a pin to it instead of
a needle, for fear he should make a botch. She sent
him to school, and through college, and out to Europe;
and he did pull the pin-lhead through, and  nadle a
pretty big hole in the cloth; he got into a way of
having, and expecting, and spending, more and more;
and she looking forward, all the same, to his coming
back and earning his living, and putting a man's
shoulder to the world's wheel. Especially after the
hard times of'57 came, and so much of her money
went in the great Life and Trust Company smash.
Then she had to draw in; and she expected him to,
right off; and then it came out that he wanted ever so
much more to pay up with abroad. And then, at last,
he got back; and things didn't open right out for him,
and he was there at home. Idle, she thought, and
not in enough hurry to bestir himself; and though she
wouldn't but have done for him, she was too highspirited for him, to like his willingness; so she had
plain words with him, at last; nobody knew what;
but there was more working in him of independence,




iNVTO GOD'S TREASUIRE-BOX.          167
may be, than showed, or than could well stand being
doubted; and he spoke back, and took himself off;
and she's never seen him from that day to this, Once
in a while there has come a letter from  somewhere,
just to let her know that he was alive, and not bearing any ill-will; but no accounts of what he was
doing, or word of cominig home; only that in the last
of the war he was a surgeon in the army under Sherman; she heard from  him  at Chattanooga, anid he
came round in the Grand M3arch to Savannah; that
was the last she knew of him; and she's proud of him,
and worried out of her life about him, and turning
her back all the time on something she can't bear to
look at or make up her conscience about, in her dealing with him; and she's grown an old woman, and
her hair and her teeth have all gone, in these ten
years."
" Where was he before he went into the war?"
" There never came two letters from the same place.
I suppose that was a-purpose."




168      PATI'NCE STRONG'S OUTIuVGS.
XV.
INTO THE FAIRY STORY.
", DON'T talk to me," Ilumbled Aunt Hetty Maria,'" when I can't tell which is teeth, and which is breadand-butter!"
Aunt Hetty Maria had come down again for a fortnight. To go to the dentist's, this time. I went with
her, and it was pretty funny.
" I've come for the permanent set," said mny aunt to
Dr. T, whom she had not seen for three years,
when she took ether and pulled his hair. " I never
wore the temporary ones.  They were too temper-y.
I lost all my patience with'em. They kept me thinking of the' wailing and gnashing,' and so of all my
sins. But I've made up my mind to learn how, now."
When we asked her what for, she wouldn't tell.
She was queer all through that visit. When we reminded her of what she said when she threw  Dr.




INTO THE PFAlIl Y STOR Y.              169
T —-'s first work across the room, and "' took to her
gums again," she only answered, I" Well, 1: couldn't uvse'ea, - it was only looks; and who cared 1theez?"
When we asked her what had made the difference
and changed her mind, and who cared now, the teeth
and the bread-and-butter were in the way.
When we saw that she wanted to get off, of course
we didn't ask her any more.  But something had evidently made a change in Aunt H-Ietty Baria, in more
than this one thing.  Every once in a while she would
break out with sing(in(g to herself some line of the old
song, "' There's nae luck about the house, " " There's
nae luck at a'."  She couldn't remember all the words;
but the music ran in her head, slhe said, and so she
filled it out, - between the teeth, -  with any sort of
syllables.
" To i doe um to diddle um
Te diddle dum to - dair;
I-is very step has music in't,
As he comes up the stair!
"De do de rol de diddle ol
De do de rol de - dore;
Give me my cloak, I'll - du de dol,
I'll see him come ashore!"




170      PA TIENVCE STR ONG'S OUTINGS.
She kept practising what she called her 1" wailing
and gnashing," with crackers and apples, and bits of
this and that, between her visits to the dentist's and
his little filings and fittings, till we thoulght she would
ruin her appetite and digestion by the time she got
the full use of her teeth; but she was in such a hurry;
she " wouldn't go blundering back to Dearwoocl not
knowing what order of natural history she belonged
to, or whether her bones were outside or in.  HI-ere.,
there was nobody to notice; but there, there was
never any kinowing who might come."
She had one little double tooth on each side left
out; she didn't care; her own were so for five and
twenty years while the six in front were good; and
she wanted to look natural.  And the left large incisor must lap over its mate; her old ones did.
Something came out in Aunt Hetty Maria's face,
with her new teeth, which had never been so plain
there before. It was a sweetness and openness; the
curve of her lips lost something that had grown set
and hard in it.
I have noticed in people who have had this aid and




IlVNTO THE FAIRY STORY.               171
replenishment of art, that almost always some expression comes to light, suiting so curiously with all the
other features that it is like a revelation.  I know one'woman who looks sly; and a man whose jaws, filled
out with their new  furnishing, gleam  cruel, like a
tiger's.  I can think of others who have had disfigurement and disguise replaced with what seems more
truly to belong to them, and to have been intended
fiom the first; faces that look more gentle, generous,
or delicate. And I do not believe, somehow, that anything can come out of us, by any accident, but what is
in.
When Aunt Hetty Mlaria was packing her trunk to
go away, she spoke out; her mouth was made up to
it by that time.' I've had a letter from Jack -ialliday."'We might have known it was coming, even befole
Aunt I-etty Maria,~ and the teeth, and the singing.
Why else did we get talking of it, that day, just a
little while ago,- mother and I?  Things in this
world always come marked with a " to be continued."
They never rise up suddenly and go right down again




172      PA TIEN CE STR O/G'S 0 UTINVR.
into their graves, like the South American rmumamies
they tell of in the earthquake. And if they did do it,
I don't believe it would be the last of them.
"' When the chestnuts are ripe in the old woods,
and the new cider is maki1ng,'- I expect - some e-to
hear from him again."
We knew that first part was in quotation marks.
She said it as we say words that have been laid by in
our hearts.
" And then you have got to come up to Dearwood."
~~ Why; it will be almost right away, auntie."
"Yes; almost right away."  It sounded like music
and dancingo, -the tone she spoke it in.  Like the
music and dancing the oldest son heard in the parable.' N~ow, where is my second-best cap-box?  Patience, won't you just see whether Emery Ann has
done pressing out that piece of bobbinet?  And give
her this yard of wide black silk for an apron, and
these two pocket-handkerchiefs."
And this was the last she would say to us then
about John Halliday.




INVTO THIE FAIR.Y STORY.          173
It was two weeks later when we got word and went
up.
The old house was all open and sunny.  Aunt
Hetty Maria had delicate little lavender ribbons in her
breakfast caps, and white satin ones for dinner and
evening. She had left off the old black lace and purple, except when she was dusting or cooking. She
looked as I remembered her fifteen years before.
It all went right through me, that morning when he
came. Just as if I had been John, and Aunt H-etty
3Maria, and myself, all at the same identical time, and
as if I had two or three different memories, and two or
three different ten years were behind me.  We can't
help giving and taking. We can't shut ourselves up in
outr own separate years if we try. Then, indeed, there
really would be only the threescore and ten, after all;
and God never thought of stinting us so.  He need
not have made so great a world and filled it so full,
if nobody was to get more out of it than that.
All John's pride and resolve, and Aunt Hetty
Maria's secret tenderness and patience and pain; the
work, and success, and the waiting; the mistakes and




174      PATIENiCE STROLY'S 0 UTING S.
the mercy; the long silences and the shield that had
been over them; the good end and the gladness; I
entered into them all. They had been gathering andl
going on in ten years that were also of my life.
" I never meant to come back till I could pay it,"
— he told Aunt Hetty Maria. 6It was money-pay
and money-pride at first; but it changed to somethimn
different as the time went on. The thing you really
cared for; I found that out; the proof that the money's
worth was in me. I was only afraid - of the Boston
papers. That some day I might see your name, and
know it was too late."
" But what about your name, Jack? Did you think
I wouldn't look for that?"
"M BMy name has been in -the papers, now and then, I
guess. Most men's have, of late years. But I cut
the head and tail off, and threw them in the fire, in the
first place; as the White Cat did in the fairy story,
when she wanted to be turned into something better,"
Jack answered, lightly.
When he said that, I jumped right off my chair. As
true as I live, it never came into my head before.  I




INTO THEY FAIRY STORY.             17 5
hadn't remembered it for years and years; but now it
flashed across me, -the boy's long name as I had
heard it some time when he first came to Uncle Parmellter's.
John Robert H-aile Hallicday.
" What's that for, Patience?" said John, as I sat
down again.' I don't think it was a good plan. Or a right plan,"
said I, catching my breath from  my surprise, and
speaking quite decided and. resentful.  6 What if it
didn't turn out so wonderfully much better, after all,
and the head and tail had to be raked out of the ashes
and tacked on again?  Or if some people, - somebody, - had come to like the middle part best?  As
they couldn't ever, perhaps, like the rest of it, or any
nane, again?  I think it was too bad upon them! "
John came riglht over to me where I sat, and deliberately pinched me. So that. nobody else could see,
however.
" Patience Strong! You're rather confused in your
analogy, but -you know a good deal too much' he
whispered.




17(6     PATIENVCE STROlING&'S OUTINGS.
Everybody knew it pretty soon, though.  It was a
turn-outing'; such as they pretend to keep for stories;
but such as happens every day in the life that stories
are made up out of. And I hadc been in every bit of
it; first one part and then another.  Whose story was
it, I should like to know, imore than mine; or half so
much, - seeing that they couldn't possibly be on both
sides of theimselves!
It was a little hard for Aunt Jetty 3Maria at the
very first, to be sure; just as if she had only got him
back to give him right away again; but halmost before
she knew it, she was takinog PRose straight into her
heart and homne, planning which roomns would do for
her, and thinking whether she had better put up red
curtains or white ones in the long chamber; and that
"' it would lave to be before the dreary weather came,
- she couldn't bear to think of a wedding in November;- mightln't we make it out for the thirtieth?
There was something so glad  about  October; the
very sound of it was yellow and bright, like fruits
and sunshine and  tingling juices and clear, frosty
air."




IlYTO TIIE FAIR Y STOR Y.           177
All this, taking it for grtanted that Dearwood should
be their first home; that she had a right to them both.
All talked over, again and again, while Dr. John was
down at MtI    making "4 head and tail " of it as best
he could, with the Nobles.
And then he brought Rose up for a three clays' visit
to his lmother; and she, in her own dear little way,settled everything as she chose.
6' Let us come back and build our own nest, with
you to help us, please," she said to Aunt HI-etty lIaria,
when Jack was out of the room.  " Don't you tire
yourself all out alone, and take away all the good of
it.  You see we should have liothing to do but to sit
right down in a finished place, and that's always disappointing. People that do the making ready, put
thoughts and thoughts into it, one after another, with
every little fixing and touching; and then, just in a
mlinute, the folks that come are shown in, and it's all
over. Let's have the thoughts and the comfort together, please."
And so it was the nicest nest-building that ever
was. We werle all there, and there was plenty of
12




178      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
room  for us all, beside the long chamber and the' little bay," that we were fixing up.
And they had been married a fortnight, and Rose
could speak her mincl, and say how she wanted things 
and John  - Ialliday's books and pictures, and Rose's
piano and plants and wedding presents had all come;
and we were nailing, and hanging, and consulting, and
placing; and nobody did anything that all the rest
didn't stand roundc and admire. And H-Iannah Ferson
-Aunt Hetty Maria's Hannah - whenever she came
to look, said it was "1 so pleasant and folksy!"  And
Aunt l-etty Maria herself was everywhere; and everybody was calling her from everywhere else, to ask her
this or show her that.'' Auntie "' "Mother!i' HIetty Maria!"
" lMis' Parmenter!"
came  fiom   upstairs, downstairs, and the lady's
chamber.
6Here I am, — all four of me! " she would call
back. And in a minute, all four of her would be there.




INTO THIE FAIRY STORY.              179
"6 She was just the spryest!" old 1Mrs. Whitcgift said,
making the little entry carpet, and being stepped over
twenty times a day.
" Nobody gave me a silver pitchfork, after all," said
Rose Halliday, up at the top of a flight of steps, hanging a basket, and looking for scissors to cut the cord.
Jack made a stride across the room to where they
lay, and a long arm up to her to give them.
" And I don't know that I really see the need," she
added,'6 if this is to last."
I guess it will last, - all the help and comfort John
Halliday can1 give her, - to the end of his life.
I have had the beauty of it, -I who never was
married, or like to be; and it makes my heart warm.
And mother and I are going home agfain, now.




180      PATIENTCE STBONG'S OUTIWAS.
xVI.
WITH THE SUNDAY STRAYS.
IT is strange how  one little glimpse, one little
taste, —of another person's living or gladness, —
stays by you, and opens the door toward all the rest.
Every morning, now, when the north-west air is
crisp with mountain frosts, and the smell of ripeness
comes with every stir, and the sun-glory is keen in the
clean-swept atmosphere, and the crown of the year's
joy lies upon the earth, I think, the first thing, of the
pleasantness up there at Dearwood; of the new,
b)right home there; or, rather, of the fresh, beautiful
soul in the old. Of John and Rose standing always
on the morning-threshold, looking  into  the years
together, as we look into the hours when the day is
prime; of the cosey breakfast, and the after-breakfast
settling; of Rose with her work-basket in her window
among her plants; of Doctor HI-alliday reading; of




WITH TNHE SUNrDAY STRA YS.           181
Aunt Hetty Maria looking in every little while, as
she goes -up and clown, upon this new acquisition of
hers of young, beautiful life; continually wanting
fresh little views of it, as we do of pretty and comfortable things we have just got and brought home.
When the night draws in, and the fire is cheerful,
and the winter-lamp is lighted that has been set by
through the warm, twilighted evenings, and all the
comfort that has ever been in one's life, or that one
has read of, seems to wrap itself around one in a
delicious fulness, - then again I thinlk of Dearwood,
and of all the long, happy winter that is before thel
there; before them  to whom a single hour together
was but a little while ago so much. Of the pretty
worsted work Rose meant to do, that she never had
had time for in her busy, careful life at home; of
Aunt HIetty Maria knitting, and John drawing, or
wood-turning,l-for he does all sorts of charming,
ingenious things, - and of all the pleasant choice of'hought;, an d talk, and occupation, which that free
time gives when there are no old things to mend, no
hurry of providing, no anxious complications to un



182      PATIEV NCE STRON~G'S OUTIVGCS.
ravel, such as come with the living on, —but all is
new and plentiful, and smooth with the snmootlmess
of that which is unbegun.
Why, it is beautiful just to know of it! And they,
after all, can't mrore than  know of it themselves.
Possession is only intimacy of knowledge.  The good
and the beauty of it is the fctct in God's world.  I
think that is the blessedness that foretells itself in the
"lknowing as we are known."  Then everybocdy's joy
will be fully ours. Then they shall sit down by fifties
acnd, by hundreds, and one bread shall be given to all;
and of the frag'ments that remain shall be taken up
baskets and baskets full  and worlds, perhaps, shall be
fed with the crumbs that fall from the IMaster's table.
But the worst of it is, that, if I don't look out, I
sha-n't do my own living.  That is the reason why we
may, now, see only in part.  It is so easy to abide in
that love which is only lovin( imagination; the love
of act may be waiting, meanwhile, in our owiin unlived
days.
MIy (lays ought to be very full this winter; so muclh
crowds upon me to do and to care for.




WI TI  THE S UVDA Y STRAYS.          183
Now that I'have found out I can paint, I think of
so many people who can't buy pictures that I imight
make them for. I gave MIrs. Shreve a maple branch
crossed by a stem of sumach. She hung it over her
maintel, and said it was as good as a fire. I must do
something for Seelie.Rubb.' And I want to copy the
3Mater Admirabilis, with the lily ancd the distaff. for
my dear little mother, at Christmas tile.
Besides that, the new horse-railroad is opened at
last, as far as Hibben's Lane. Only five minutes'
walk from our door. Why, we are allmost city people! But mother and I don't go in much. At first
I thought we shouldn't be mluch concerned. I didn't
worry about the Sunday people, andcl  the fruit-trees,
and the gardens, as some of the neighbors did. In
fact, I have had so many other things to take up my
mind, that I really thought very little about it, until
all at once when we got home from  Dearwood, we
found that the cars were to run, and that we were to
be Metropolitans the very next  Mlonday.  T hings
always do get finished up, or broken off, or changed
somehow, while you're gone.




184      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINVGS.
It has come to me since - the force of it - talking
with Seelie Rubb.  She was here one day last week,
to cut my new brown empress cloth.  It's just —
more outings; these very Sunday outings.
" I'm  so glad," Seelie said, " of these new horsecars.  Susan came out last Sunday, with her husband
and two of her children, to drink tea. The other
two are coming next time. Why, it seemed almost
like Thanksgiving.  M other said she didn't know as
she should ever have used her best cups and saucers
again — they'd been put away so long.  They're real,
beautiful  china, lMiss Patience;  and  the plates;
there's only seven left of them, but they've each
got a separate figure. There's currants on one, and
strawberries on another, and cherries, and  plums,
and peaches, and grapes, and a cut pomegranate;
and with every fruit there's a little blossom of its
own dropped on one side. Mlother says it always
makes her feel like people again to set them out."
Seelie set up the shoulder-puff of my sleeve half an
inch higher, as she spoke, giving an air, I suppose,
more " like people" to my plain, winter dress, than it




TI ITI THIE SUND A Y STRA YS.        185
might have had but for the little accompanyinn g   puff
and set-up of her spirits, as she told  about the
plates.'" That isn't too high, is it?" I asked, a little
anxiously.
"~ Oh, dear, no, miss; the higher and squarer the
better, now. Why, they actually put little crutches
under their shoulders, somehow, they say, to raise
them  up. And what with the bucliram fronts, and
the panniers behind, and other things that they just
whisper about, - why, besides needing to be a qualifiedl architect and engineer before you can be a real
dress-imaker, I aint truly sure, sometimes, that it isn't
a downright wickedness altogether! "
"People talk," said I, "6 about Boston not bein
finislied.  I wonder if the women ever will be.
They've been added on to and taken off from, and
lengthened out and cut short, ncld humped up and
flattened down, and I don't know how many different
things, since I can remember. I wonder if they'll
ever find out what is just right and prettiest, and
stop there and be comfortable."




186      PATIENCE STWONG'S  OUTI.VGS.
" No, indeed," said Seelie Rubb, with a simple little
consternation in her voice at such a foolish looking
for.
"D o you know, Seelie," I said, soberly, "'that
when I hear these things, I feel as if I saw the'abomination  of desolation  standing in the holy
place'? And I can seem to understand the' woe' to
those who shall be mothers'in those days!'"
" It is pretty bad, Miss Patience," little Seelie
repeated, shaking her head.' And it does make
me feel wicked, learning' to make a trade of it. Why,
it isn't hardly much better, seems to me,- some of
it, - than selling liquor to the men  "
" Only you work for' the plain people, Seelie; it
doesn't touchl your conscience quite so closely. And
you don't contrive the fashions, you know, to lead the
silly women captive."
" Why, Miss Patience, there  aren't any plain
people!  The delaines and the alpacas have to be
humped up and flounced out, just as much as the silks
and the poplins. And there's just where the wickedness comes in- or out, at least. It isn't so much




TVITH THIE  SUVD A Y S TWRA YS.     187
for the rich women, who only drive to the dressmaker's, and give their orders; but I know lots of
mothers and girls who have to spend all their time
and their brains on the home-made things, and more
money, besides, than they've any business to.  A
merino gown, or. a poplin-alpaca, isn't much; but by
the time you've got the buttons, and the ribbons, and
the braid, and the hailcloth, and have spent a Nweek
putting it together, it gives you a feeling in the pit of
your stomach as if you'd got a broken commandment
there."
" But about your sister, and the horse-railroad.
How nice it is, - this coming out to Sunday hometeas, - for the city people!"
"' Why, you don't know!" said Seelie.  "I go
down to church in the car, sometines, now, it's such
a long walk; and the fathers and mothers, and little
children that get in and out, with their hanads full and
hearts full of the country, just this once a week, - it's
beautiful! It makes me think of the Lord walking in
the corn-fields. And it's true for more than the walking, too, I'm  afraid.  I guess the poor things are




188      PATIENCE STRONG'S0 OUTIYNGS.
pretty well a-hungered, some of them, before they get
back. They don't all have home-teas to come to."
" They ought to, Seelie, somehow!"
That was my first thought about it; and it stayed
by, although I had to turn it over awhile before I
could quite see the New Testament part without the
queerness.
I don't want to be crazy-queer, about anything; and
I know it's no use to expect to provide for all the
Sunday strays, and that it wouldn't always do if you
could; but the  t to think of the young fathers and
mothers, - week-workers, -- btinging  out the little
children into the blessed country on the day of the
Son of Man, and going back, any of theln, worn and
hungry! He always lhad compassion on the multitucles, and cared lest, possibly, there might any faint
by the way. If we could get out of this world into
the nearest edge of the heavenly places, once in a
while, would the angels shut their doors, I wonder?
5Wouldn't they rather take us in and feed us with the
bread of the kingdom?  I think we should look for
them to do so, and that our idea of the heaven we may




TITH TIHE SUiVDAY STRA Y:.          189
go into by and by, is, first of all, of somebody coming
to meet us.
I thought and thought, till I felt there was surely
something, in. the way of a loaf, for ime to do. And
that was the beginning.
Mother and I talked it over. And so, Saturday, we
baked a basket of crisp gingerbread and fried a panful
of doughlnuts, and Siunday morning we set out a pitcher
of milk from the 1milking. And then we were all
ready; if the little children did come along.
Then, being all ready, I began to be afraid they
wouldn't come, - our way. So, about three o'clock, I
said to mother:" Motherdie! I believe I'll put on my hat and shawl,
and walk down towardc the head of the lane, and see
what I can see."
And mother laid her spectacles down on the window-sill, and smoothed out her lap, saying:So I would. They might turn off the other road,
by the brook; and that would be a pity, seeing the
doughlluts and the gingerbread are up here; besides
the lane, that of course they wouldn't know of."




190      PATIENVCE STRONG1'S OUTINGS.
We had really began to expect soime special.  they."
It was a lovely late autumn day. It seemed as if
the sun had done his summer work, and the spare
firagments of his glory were flung down upon us for
pure joy. As if human creatures might have thern all,
now that the grain was ripe and the grass (gone, and
the fruit mellow. It was like " after the party."
I met them just there, by the bi-ook; or rather I saw
them coming, and managed that they. should overtake
me with my face toward home, as I stood and picked
some bits of bright leaves out of the hedge.
They came up chattering, - the little ones. I had
been puzzling' what I could say if they didn't take our
road; indeed, what I could exactly say if they did.
But you always see as you come to it.'" Let's go this way," says the biggest girl.  " Down
here, where this pretty water goes."
"No," says the boy, sturdily. "I don't care for
the water. I saw a squirrel up here on the wall. I
want to see where he goes to."
"' It's quieter thlis way," suggests the man.
"And sunnier this," replies the woman.




TWITtI TiHE SUNDAY STRAYS.          191
W" ell, mother, what do you say? Say quick! "
These last were evidently words of habit with the
husband, — spoken always in that smiling way and
cheery tone, -  eaning: —'"All you have to do is to settle your own wish.
My way's yours. And I'm not in the least bit of a
hurry. So - say quick! "
I took it to myself; feeling in such a hurry lest they
should choose the other road.
So I " said quick " just what came into my head.
" If you want to take the children a pleasant walk,
ma'am, I can show you a beautiful green lane up here
a little way that leads down into the woods."
"' Oh, thank you! Come, James, we'll go this way,
if this lady is so kind."
So we walked on together, and mother, looking out
of her window, saw me coming up, just as if I had
been to meet Eliphalet's folks down at the cars. I almost caught myself calling up to her, -" Yes, they've
come!"  They were so exactly the very people we
had been looking for.
Of course I didn't suppose they were hungry yet,




192      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
and I couldn't do everything  all at once. I showed
them downl the green lane, and left therm to find their
own way and their own happiness by themselves; only
I did just bethink myself to turn back and say to the
elder girl, lest they should' happen to get out by the
turnpile, and so round: —
" Come back this way, dear, and stop a minute, and
I will give you some flowers."
So we were sure of our company now, mother and I;
and we went and sugared a plate of dlouglnuts, and
hacl mugs handy for the children; and then I sat down
again and went on reading to her out of the'" Sclh6nberg-Cotta Family."




INTO OTHER PEOPLE'S BUSILVESS.   193
INTO OTHER PEOPLE S BUSINESS.
So that began it. And now, as I said, I have pleuty
to plan and to do. Because, although the pleasant autumn weather is soon over, and the winter-time is no
time for Sunday-outings, yet I know how it will be when
the spring comes; and how Fast Day, and May Day,
and every day that they can get, will be bringing them,
- those tthat I have got acquainted with (and it is
wonderful how one gets on in any particular world of
people when one once begins with one or two), and
many more.
And they shall all be welcome. We shall have to
bake bigger baskets of gingerbread, and fry huger palls
of doughnuts, and keep out whole bowls of milk; but
there shall not one of them go by our door wishful or
weary.
And it gives the chance for other things. One doing
1l




194      PATIENCE STRONYG'S OUTING'S.
lights the way to the next. All the little paths and
aisles toward the light of the Great Love open into
each other.
There are books and pictures and things to look at,
for the fathers and mothers, and the little children.
Books to lend too; they like so to take something
home. So I have got plain-bound copies, and copies
second-hand, nicely covered, - quite a bookshelf fuill,
- of pleasant, useful reading, on purpose; and it is
nice to have plenty of money to do this with so comforttably. I buy cheaply, and make the most; for I like to
keep the feeling of being rich behind my doing, as long
as I can. Some things must cost; the stereoscopic
views, for instance. I have two glasses, and a great
many pictures; I can never have too many of these.
Why, when they get out here, - these friends of mine,
-which is as far as they will ever get, most of them,
in point of fact, - I can take them right on into all
the beautiful unknown places of the wide world. Into
the Alp-heights, and the Yo-Semite; to Niagara and
Trenton and Mount Washington; up the Saguenay andcl
the Mississippi; among the Dalles of the St. Croix and




INTO OTITER PEOPLE'S BUSINVESS.    195
to the falls of the 3Minnehaha.  These are the people
that ought to go in this way. What a shame it would
be to keep such wonderful glimpses in rich parlors and
libraries only; for people who can go far and wide, if
they choose, among the realities!
Of them all, that which gives most awe and pleasure
is the moon-picture. The great telescopic moon, hanging in black space, with its jagged mountains catching
the beams of the eternal sun, and flinging down the
self-same actual points of light that have so rested
there, on the little card held up to it for its portrait
two hundred and forty thousand miles away.
The great Nothing that it is in! The upholding of
its separate round mass  The present hand of God,
more truly recognized because no hold is seen! Foundationless! If the old Eastern tradition had anly truth,
- if the earth were a flat plain and seemed to rest on
anything; if its great pillars stood upon an elephant,
and the elephant upon a tortoise, and th, tortoise on
solnething untraceable in depth, but not beyond conception, - where would be our thought of the environing spirit?  This wonderful, awful floating of every



196      PATIEYNC7E STRONVG'S OUTINGS.
thing, from the sun-globes to the meanest atoms, —
this utter separateness, - it is by this we get an inmost notion of that rest, that reliance, that nearness,
that strength, in which we lie!
It comes into their faeces, every one, - more or less
dimly or consciously, - as they look at this moon-picture. I need not say a syllable, I know. It will tell
it to them for itself. The word it speaks will bury itself in their souls; a seed to grow up into the grandest, holiest knowledge.
It is something to minister such sacraments as these.
"It is all very well," Emery Ann says, " with
the decent mechanic people.  But how will you do
when the ragged boys and the coarse men get wind
of it and come along?"
I'  suppose I shall think when the time cornes,"
I answered.  "And if they are too coarse, I dare
say nothing will drive them away sooner than politeness."
" There's something in that," said Emery Ann.
" My sister Loviny used to tell her little boy, -' Don't
come into the parlor unless you can be polite.' So one




INVTO 0 THEY  PEEOPLE'S B' USI'VESS.    197
day he.stood in the doorway when she had company.'Why don't you come in, I-oratio, and take off your
cap?' says Loviny.   I don't feel as if I wanted to be
polite,' says he, and cleared. It don't alwers take a
perleece officer to keep folks out from where they aint
fit, — not even, forzino, out of heaven."
Miother says she's' proper glad" we thought of it.
Dear mother! What shall we do when the quaint old
people are all gone, and the quaint old words are all
used up?  They are a part of speech by themselves;
not common, not ill-bred, nor anything like modern
slang; but full of pure meaning and time-flavor.  T1he
old Puritans sent them down to us, many of them;
this, certainly.  They were so self-contained; and
words were so chastened in their using. Nobody was
ever extravagantly glad; nothing was ever excessively
pleasant; only "' properly" so.  Yet the sober word
meant all that they could say, as nmuch as our words
do; and the meaning grew more and more, as they
crowded all their feeling into it, until the very term of
moderation and restraint came to have a most lipsmacking sound of the superlative.




198  PATIENCE SST'ONV'S OUTINxCTS.
Sometimes I think I get more out of other people
than is fair; I have grown so into the way of putting
myself in their places, and feeling just how things mlst
seem to them.  It is almost like reading their letters,
or listening at their doors. I wonder if it's old maids'
way; and if that is how we get such a character; because we must needs borrow so much?  I wonder if
it is the essence of prying and gossiping?
I think the difference must be in the point of view.
If you stand outside, andl peer and pick and criticise,
- if you look for what had better not be, -- then I'm
sure choking in the sea isn't a bit too bad for such a
haunting and possessing; but if you go right down into
their hearts, and feel their joys and troubles with them,
-- I think that is even what our Lord himself icd, and
how he helped them, and "G bore " their sorrows and iniquities, and gave them of his peace.
I try to have it so. For my imagination — whatever that is, and I think it is the power that goes out
of us into spiritual places, gathering realities — will
reach forth and lay hold of what is not, altogether, my
very own.




INTO OTH 7E  PEOPLE'S B USINESS.    199.
I go here and there, in this fashion.  To Dearwood,
as I was saying; and lately, very much, just in this
way, to Mrs. Shreve's.
She has had a piece of good fortune.  She has had
some money left her. Money that she never expected
or heard of.  " Things are never done happening, in
this world," Emery Ann says.  " Everything can wait,
but chickens and children."
Late in life, after many pinches and worries, it has
come to her. Not an enormonus fortune; but that large
"'enough" to her quiet wants, that sets her heart at
rest.
And it is so pleasant to feel how it is with her. And
she shows it so simply.  Not by any airs or pretences,
-- no, indeed! Only by breathing free; as if some
band were loosened that had drawn tight around her
life.
She makes half-a-dozen new night-gowns; " in case
of sickness," she says, -'it is good to have a store,"
-and I know, with the high price of cotton, she did
not have more than two new ones together, for many a
year; and she sends by me to buy Coventry ruffling,




200      PATIEVNCE STROYNG'S OUTINGS.
by the piece, for the necks and bands.  She gets nice,
new napkins, - I marked them for her with an old
English S in indelible ihk, - and she hires a woman
by the day to help her girl with the washing, or when
there is extra scrubbing to do. She has let Dick go to
a tailor, and the world is therelTy a shade brighter all
over to the boy. She has a fire and a large lamp in
the best room, of evenings, when he comies home; and
when mother and I go over, neighboring, the whole
house looks as if it were always so, and could be as
well as not.  Nothing is very strange or new; only
safe and sure and hearty.  When a thing breaks, she
says I Never mind!" not keeping the " mind"  all to
herself, with a pain, like a secret returning echo. I
think she can't help a sort of satisfaction, now andcl
again, in a little loss or a giving out; klnowing that
the replacing is no longer a takig from one thing to
make good another.
The way it happenecl was this.
I know that if I were putting together a story, —
for the sake of the story, -which I never meant to
do, and never could have done in all my life, - the




INTO O TIIER PEOPLE'S EBUSIXESSS.   201
way it happened ought to have come first; indeed
everything ought to have come first, except the very
thing that I was driving at.  Not by any means
with A, B, and C reguplarity either; I know better
than that, too; you must " say it, skipping about;" I
have not read the new style of novel and magazine
writing unobservantly.  You must clip first into a
little bit of the end; then plunge into the micddle,
talking about people and places and thinmgs, as if
everybody had been regularly introduced, and then
gradually, by little dashes and allusions, catchings uip
and hitchings on, get the antecedents and the connections together, with the help of the clever reader, -
and nobody else has any business with modern literature, - in a manner equally creditable to his sagacity
and your own ingenuity.
But, as I am not writing a story, - only putting
down things and thoughts as they come to me, in a
very plain, small, every-day livingC,-I put down first
what interests me.most,- dear lMrs. Shreve's long
breath.
The way it happened, then, was this —




202      PATIENCE STRONG'S 0 UTINVGS.
I was looking out of my window one day, when:
saw a very queer little man oetting out of a very queer
little chaise, at Mrs. Shreve's door.
The man was short and thin; the chaise was tall
and thin; and the horse was a roan, chunky and lomw;
so low that he made me think of a little spotted dog,
trained to run between the wheels, and that the real
horse must be somewhere, invisibly, beyond, or roundl
the corner.
The man had wiry little legs, and a round ball of a
head, anid he wore the roundest of brown felt hats;
and his thick, short sack-coat, also brown, set out
round his body so as to complete another ridiculous
notion that came into my head, that he was like an
unfinished piece of knitting-work; the needles stuck
into the ball at one end, and the piece of web roundin;g out between. And his name was accordling to my
fancy, and bore it out curiously, as I learned afterwards.  It was Mr. Knott Webber, the keen little
Boston lawyer.
A certain client of his —-Aaron Eachfield — had
just died.




INTO 0 TIHER PEOPLE'S BUSINXESS.    203
Some years ago, this Aaron Eachfield, a master
mechanic, came into his office, for the first time, in
complany with Richard Shreve, whose widow, - as he
said at this point of the interview which Mrs. Shreve
rmostly repeated to me, word for word, here and there,
from  time to time afterward, quite in the approved
constructive style I was just speaking of, and which I,
with the due cleverness, patched and pieced together,
till I have got the whole incident very clearly and
prettily in my head, — whose widow, he said, he believed he had now the pleasure of addressing.
Mr. Shreve had been in a large way of business,
and had gone into many building speculations. These
it was that ruined him, as to money's worth, - finally;
but meanwhile, he had put work and money in others'
way, and had built up many a modest little fortune,
although failing, at last, of his own. I believe there
are books somewhere, on which there will be found
records that make him a heavy stockholder in a kind
of Mutual Company whose dividends pay largest and
best after all earthly accounts are closed.
66 I've brought you a man, Mr. Webber," said Mr.




204'PATIENCE STRONG~'S OUTINGCS.
Shreve to his lawyer, "who wants somebody to draw
up his will. M3y friend, 3Mr. Aaron Eachfield; my
friend, MIr. Knott Webber. And now, as I have an
important appointment in a quarter of an hour, I'l1
leave you to get better acquainted without me."
And that was the last; Richard Shreve ever knew of
the business,
Aaron Eachfield turned round to the lawyer.' Yes, sir. I've laid up a snug' little property, of
some thirty thousand dollars.  And that man, sir,
who's just gone out, is the man that put me in the'way
of it. I may say it's his gift. For a gift comnes down,
sir, through many hands; and in every one it's as real
a giving, as though God Almighty weren't at one end,
and a fellow's own hard worlk at the other. But that's
taking up your time; I beg your pardon.  What I
want, is a will, rightl and tight; disposing of this said
thirty thousand dollars in two equal halves. One to
my wife, Rebecca Eachfield, and I'm  sorry to say I
haven't seen her for as many years as I've given her
thousands, and them more, I'm  afraid, than'll do her
any real good. Then, provided I leave no child or




INTO OTIIEJP PEOPLE'S B USEIXESS.   205
child's child, - and the only one there is isn't likely
to marry or to outlive me, poor things -the other
half to Richard Shreve, Esquire, or his widow, or his
oldest child, whichever stands to represent him, if so
be, after I'm gone. And that being the whole of it, I
don't know as I need to bother you much longer now.
When it's done, I'll come and sign."
And the little lawyer having~ unravelled himself of
this, held out his hand, and shook  MBrs. Shreve's
warmly, and told her he was glad in his soul to hav\e
to come and tell her of it.
" For Aaron Eachfield was a grand good fellow;
and Richard Shreve, - well, you know, ma'am, what
he was; and it's good money that comes through such
men's fingers; ancd I wish you well of it; wzell of it
ma'am; in my soul I do!"
After that, I saw the rest of it; the little knittingwork man sticking his brown ball (apparently) on its
pins again, and rolling himself up as if he had done
his stent for that time, and getting into his tall chaise
again, and rattling away with the little roan horse
trotting underneath.




206      PATIEINCE STE OlVG'S OUTINGCS.
And so that night, happening in, I saw that MIXrs.
Shreve was rather nervous; and, lighting her lamp,
and putting the globe on, she let it slip, and broke it
into fifty pieces against the stove-foot; upon which,
while I picked up the scraps of glass, she sat down
and burst out crying.
I knew she couldn't well spare the dollar it would
take to buy another; but I was afraid, for her giving
way like this, which wasn't usual to her, that the knitting-work man must h~ave brought some botch or other
to worry her; and I began to be quite angry with him
in my heart, and to feel as if I should like to pull out
all his stitches.
And then, when she got over it a little, she told me
not to mind; what made her cry was, that it was no
kind of matter; that she could get as manly lampshades as she liked; and that nobody had ever had
such a husband; and -that it would be an ache in her
heart all her life that she'd never seen Aaron Eachfield,
to tell him what she thought of him, and to say God
bless him!
And if that wasn't beginning in the right modern




INTO OTHIE1R PEOPLE'S B USINiESS.   207
style to tell a story, I should like to know what would
have been!
So first and last, between us, it's all the same. If
any one likes it better so, they can begin at this end
and read it again, backward. Anyhow, there's a new
chamber firelighted and warm in my heart; a new
place to go into and be glad in; every time I think of
BMrs. Shreve and her lamp-shades, and her bonnets,
and her table-cloths, and her night-gowns, and all the
little things that used to fret and trouble her, and
that now she can be so easy about.
And, as Emery Ann says, — We can all wait our
turn; things are never clone happening; everybody
can be patient but children and chickens.




208     JPATIEN CE STR ON(G'S  OUTINiG S.
XVHiI.
INTO THE MIDNIGHT.
-WEEKS ago, I wrote those last words.
HI-ow can I bear to put it down here, - that which
came after?
The pleasant heart-chambers are all shut tp.
God has called -me out - into the darkness.  I
grope and grope, reaching after my life that is taken
away from me, and set so far onward.
I know that it is the evening and the morning
that are the day; I know the morning is beyond; but
the midnight is heavy upon me.
0 mother! m y dear, dear little mother!




1NVrO THE DAY-GLEAM1.            209
XIX.
INTO THE DAY-GLEAM.
I-IER empty chair is before my eyes.
The little stand is there, and the work-basket; and
her spectacles are lying on the window-ledge.
Nobody touches them  but me, and I place them
every morning as she did. I do not let the dust lie
on them, but I will never put them away.
Yet it is not the chair, nor any place, that held her.
When she was there, to my sight, it was not all of
her. It was only the sign of her. Her real presence
was in all the room, — in all the house. In all the
world, lighting it up for me.
Is it different now because the sign is set elsewhere
in another chamber, higher up?  When I was down
stairs and she above, the house was no less full of her.
When I went miles away my life was no less full of her.
I am coming to think of it so.  I am  coming,
14




210     PATIENCE STRONG'S 0 OUTINGS.
through days and nights of pain, to the beginning of
the sun-break. Not out into darkness, but out into
the breadth and glory of the many mansions, has the
Good Father called my soul.
When I think how it has been between us, -how
the blue of the morning, and the sweetness of the
summer, and the little pleasantness of home, and the
thought that from anywhere came to touch us both,
were the things that held us really close, and that our
hearts met in, -I know that the bodily presence was
not much, —was not our living. And that our real
life can not be broken.
I set her place straight, and put the little things
about, there in the window, and make up the dear
look of the pleasant day we are to have together; and
the same love is in it that was in it then; and so the
soul is in it; and so the pleasant day must be, and is.
Does not she know?  EI-ow did she know it then?
It was not in the table, nor the chair, nor the book,
nor the basket; only that our thought met in these,in that which was within them, rather, and behind the
signs.




INTO THE DAY-GLELA.iM          211
It is only that, - that she has gone behind the signs.
Into the very peace of the blue morning, into the
very rest of the tender twilight, into the very joy of
the new-springing thought that wants and waits not
words; into the continual promise and forelooking of
the pleasant -day that is always just begun.
When these things touch me, through the types, she
is in them with me, without the types. Just as she
was before. She has entered the within. The within that is also the beyond, and the unbound.
Out, into the wider life, - into the spiritual places.
Is this whither He would lead me now, by her clear
drawing and guidance? Then ought I to be glad;
gladder than in any other leading He has ever given.
Only, the pain and the strain! The reaching forth
one's hands, with the clog of the flesh upon them, to
lay hold of things in that world the things of which
may neither be touched nor handled!
This blind walking in the midst of glory! I know
that it is here, and close; and to her it is manifest.
But I am as the beggar crying -by the wayside, among
the crowds that looked upon the face of the Lord,



21 2     PATIENCE ST RONG'S OUTINGS.
feeling only that he is here, and that the great multitude is about him, - crying only " IHave mercy on
me, that I may receive my sight!"
Yet, when my heart is warm, I know, as the blind
know, that I am  in the sunshine that I -cannot
see.
I had a dream of her.
It seemed to me that I had work in my hand; large
work, - sewing; and that I went down the garden
with it alone. I came to a wall - a wall freshly built,
-that stopped me. I wondered, - and then I relembered.  C The sepulchre! In my garden, also, there
is a new tomb, now!"
When, behold, in the seeming sepulchre, a door;
which, when I opened, showed me a fair room, full of
sunshine; and in the sunshine, as if she were the
heart of it, she sat. And she had work in her hand,
like mine; only it was finished. And she spoke in
the dear old tone, and the light was all. around her,
and in her look.'" Childie! Cole to sit and work with me?  That
is good. Sit here, where it is warm  and pleasant;




INTO  THE DAY-GLEAFI.              213
sew your seam, while I pick out the basting-threads
from this of mine."
And I never felt her company so dear and sweet, in
all my waking life, as I felt it in that moment of my
dream.
Words woke me, that were spoken in the spirit.  " I
am the Door; by Me ye shall go in and out."  And
the rest of it came after; the word of my vision.
Motherdie! I will bring my work in my hand, and
sit with you in the sunshine. I will patiently sew nmy
seam of life that is not yet ended, while you draw out
the earth-threads from your beautiful finished garment.
And all the same, our labor is one, as it was before.
I am glad you can draw out the threads, motherdie!
the threads of the seam that I have still to do; and I
am glad, and I know, that you still work on somehow
beside me. I am glad of the sunny mansion, and of
the door that opens easily and gently inward. Close
by, - out of the garden,.- out of the nearest pleasantness of visible things!
Everybody thought, at first, that I would go away
from here. Why, where should I go?  If this were




214      PA TEiCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
lonely, what would the wide world be, where she never
was? And if this were her home, where her spirit
clung so long, where else should I find the sweet
haunting of her life and love, that are the only presence, let the body be laid down as it may?
No; I shall stay here. If I went away, I must
needs come back, haunting, too. And I feel as if I
should meet, in the spirit, a tender reproach, - a sigh
of " how could you?" through the dear, old, forsaken
rooms.
At first I was afraid that I should not have Emery
Ann. She, too, had made up her mind for me, that I
must needs go; and her brother had written to her,
again and again, from away down East, at Skowhegan,
that he wanted her there to keep his house.
So there came to be so much said and thought about
it before she realized that I would still certainly want
her here, that it divided her mind. She felt, she said,
"' as if she had actually moved, and the thing was now
to come back again."  I wanted her to take her free
choice, and I told her to think it over as long as she
liked.




INTO THE DAY-GLEAA.             215' That means, keep moving. Why, I shall be all
wore out, going back and forrard in my mind; and
good for nothing for either of you by then I stop. I
tell you, Miss Patience, you don't know what an awful
waggle a settled kind of a mind gets into, when once
it is upsot  "
So poor Emery Ann laid awake nights, and came
down with her eyes all dropped in, in the morning,
and brought in breakfast like an Affery Flintwinch
in a dream.
She looked sometimes as if she wanted me to question her, to get a decision out of her that she was
quite beyond producing for herself.'" Well?" said I, one morning, more as an answer
to her own eyes than as an inquiry.
" Well," she replied; as if the forced decision were
coming, and glad too, —and then suddenly caught
herself back into the debatable ground again.  She
set down the tray, and lifted up her hand, moving her
thumb to and fro, as the children do in the game of
S' imon."
" Well, ma'am, - Simon says - Wigwag!"




216      PA TIENCE STR ONG'S OUTINGS.
And every morning after that, for about a week, she
would set down the tray without a word, and lift up
her hand, and make the sign.
But at last she came in with a brighter face than
she had worn since —since the change and shadow
fell; and when she had emptied her hands of their
burden, she made a great sweep in the air and brought
her right thumb downward upon the table, planting it
there as if she stamped some solemn and irrevocable
seal.
" Simon says - DOWN, mna am!"
And, I believe it is down, now, for as long as we
both shall live.
I asked her how it had come about.
" Well, ma'am, I've been tossed by the winds, and
in jeopardy. But the Lord has kept me in one mind
now, - for I just left it all to him when I found I
couldn't stay there a minute myself, - for twenty-four
hours together; and so he's brought me to land. I
call tell a sign when it does come, besides its being a
thankful deliverance."




INTO THIE DAY-GLEAL3.             217
I believe nothing lifts us so far forward as pain and
hardness.
I do not think, as I sometimes have thought and
been afraid, that they, in the heaven-peace and fieedom, will go on so fast beyond us as to go away. I
think that we who stay and bear, are climbing by
rough, grand steps to as beautiful a height. And that
they must see it so; as we see hard lives and great
anguishes here, and behold them with a reverence.
I believe the earth life is grand; almost grander
than the first heaven of rest it reaches to. I think
the Father's angels must have looked with a more
worshipping awe on tho Son of Man in the glory of
his suffering, than in the glory of his power.
It can only be that it is one same world, where one
same work of love and faith is done under different
conditions. And I can think, somehow, of how it
may be, and of things it is like.
The man, for instance, grapples numbers in his
brain, and sum  and relation are beautiful abstract
truths; abstract, but real; the mnore real; and he
feels that he gets hold of them somehow. The little




218      PATIENVCE STRON&'S OUTIN~GS.
child slides colored balls on wires, and cannot go
beyond his sight. Yet they are both reaching into the
same realm, and touch, mentally, the same things.
We work in the spiritual relations by signs. The
angels work in the inner things themselves. And
these inner things are not in one corner of the universe and their signs in another. I believe it is one
great Here.
I think of it when I walk in the streets of the wonderful, busy city. I think of what is there beside the
stones and the buildings.  Of what they stand for,
or else they could not stand at all; of the real grandness and strength; of the thought-work and living
energies, and of the needs and loves out of which
these things grow; and I think that behind the things
which we " behold," and of which, some day, perhaps,
" there shall not be one stone left upon another,"
there is something immortal which shall inot pass
away; some word of God; and that, in the mildst, the
spirits of God are walking with ns even now.
Of God, —or of evil; for the kingdoms may be
growing together, - their very stones interloclked and




INTO THE DAY-GLE-A2I.            219
cemented; yet in the unseen, knowing each other not.
Divided by the great gulf which is not depth or distance, only utter unrelation; as there are powers and
properties in. nature that coexist, yet never touch or
recognize or invade each other, because they have no
common end or tending.
I think of it in the simplest things of every day
and of our doing; as our tastes develop and our life
expresses itself; as we make about us the look that
we love best; that we are building, so, the very home
in the heavens, that is now, and shall be.
Perhaps I cannot so much as put a flower in a vase,
or hang a picture on the wall, or make anything sweet
and clean and let the sunshine ill upon it, without
putting what the flower and the picture and the sunlighted purity mean into the unseen mansion that is
here, alnd is waiting.
It always seems as if one did more than the mere
thing. If I move about a little furniture, and make
some room that I had not before, the range and spaciousness are not just exactly the feet that I have
gained, but a grand, indefinite opening. It is an idea




220      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
of latitude that is as good  to me, and signifies as
much, as any breadth of emptiness that could be built
around with walls.
Children see this poetry of things, - -which is their
spirit, - always. The high, broad steps or stairs they
always like to play on are more to them than a mere
way of getting up. The little cricket in the corner,
the nice corner itself, the seat in the apple-tree, —
these thilgs to the child have life and importance,
because the child does II always behold" the inward
of things.  Growing older, we forget; or greater
things displace these little ones; we can sit anywhere; yet we do like our corner still.  Enough
lingers with us to keep the soul of the home-idea;
and we go onl gathering round it the body which fits
and sets forth the spirit.  We are "' building better
than we know."
I think, - I am sure,  motherdie! that we have
built together. That you are in it with me, still;
the home that this is the sign and the outshowing of;
the home that is not " very far off."




INTO THE MORNIVNG.              221
xx.
INTO THEt MORNING.
T-HE sunshine among my flowers, to-day, made me
so glad! It came in among them from away through
the far heaven, and touched every little stemn and leaf
with a thread, a pulse, of the glory that is also at
the same moment, unbroken, in the deep heart of the
Sun!
It tells so much. Everything is such a showing.
When we begin to look at it so, all life is such a divine
parable. And the things of this world are what we
cannot possibly stop in; but ways out; every way,
into the everlasting life.
WVays out! That was what I began, in my simpleness, to write about, not knowin  how far it would
take ime, or how much I was meaning in the little
things that I was trying to say.
I found out what my'' outings" were, that reached,




222      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
by insight, or imagination, or sympathy,. or little
doings of some sort of kindness, into life and ran ge
beyond my own little quietness and abiding.
I found so many doors stood open; that that which
seemed the very stop and closure was only a gate thll.
swung on easy, delicate hinges, to let me through into
a wider place.
But I hardly knew how it was all one, - the nearest
and the farthest.  I hardly thought what narrowinog of
loss and pain it would be that should come and shut inme
in for a season, only to broaden out - as it is broadening- into glimpses of that life our living all takes
hold of, and all our loving is projected into; of that
kingdom, the gates of which are never shut at all
by day; and, as to the night-time, there is no night
there!
This is the beautiful Easter-time.
Yesterday there were flowers in the church; sweet
spring flowers, white and tender, like new-born hopes;
andl bright, fresh, living green.
To-day, motherdie, there are flowers in your will



IlYTO THE fMORNING.            223
dow, - Easter flowers; white and purple crocuses and
snowdrops. You love the crocus, -mother! You used
to say it was " such a comforting little flower; it came
before you expected it."  So I put them there to-clay;
andcl the comfort looks out at me from. their delicate
faces.
The house is pleasant, mother!
The winter is gone; and in the winter-time I found
new ways of making pleasantness, - for you and me!
For you are in it all, and it is for your sake. I learn
so the deep sweetness Christ meant for us, when he
bade us do for his sake!
We are not lonely here.  YomZ never were lonely;
and I would not let any dreariness come down about
your home.
When Emery Ann made up her mindl-her good,
kind, faithful mind - to stay by me, -by us, mother!
she had a hard indecision to win through.
" For you see," she said, " the main thing is, that
now Matilda is going to be married, ma was talkin'
some of breakin' up and going to Penuel's to live.
And she and little Rhodory would kind o' want some



224      PASTENCE STRONG'S OUTINGS.
body along with'em this winter, because Penuel thinks
of going in."
" In?  Where?" I asked her.
"Camp. Lumbering.  They wouldn't hear from
him, maybe, for six months; and then, there'd be no
tellin' what first. It's a precious anxious time in the
spring, you may believe, amongst the lumbermen's
folks, up and down the Kennebec.  When the river
comes tearin' and ragin' by their doors and windows,
day long and night long, straight from where the boys
are, as if it did bring news; and they can think of
nothing else. WVhen they know the big rafts are
making, and the log-drivin' begiunin', and the freshets, and the jams; and them that comes home safe'll
be most sure to bring some news of trouble for somebody, out of the six months' winter, and the silence,
and the dangler. I dic think I'd ought to be with
her."
It was the same love, motherclie! Yours and mine.
What could I say, then?
I feel so tender for everybody's mother now; and.
for all womenl who are beginning to grow old.




INTO  TILE MIORNINVG.            225
That is what mother, and daughter, and sisterhood,
and all, are given for. Little bits of what holds all
together.  The heart-work and the heart-life of the
world. So that all motherliness is our mother's, and
all child's love and brother's love, or even what mlliht
be, is ours. As it was His who said, "1 Of these who
do the Father's will, each is mine, in every tie; each
is my brother, and sister, and mother."
I saw  it the other day- I wanted  to  come
home and tell you- in a plain, common man; this
beautiful recognition; and it warmed my heart for
many days.
I was coming out in the car. The conductor was a
young, bluff, fresh-faced fellow; and among the passelgers was a tidy, comfortable old Scotchwoman. She
" wanted to stop at MITrs. 3NI'Ilvery's; a little, low,
brown house with a lattice-work porchway,.and steps
through it up to the door. Did he know?  Just past
Grover's Corner."
"'All right, mother!" says the youn1g' conductor.
That touched  me to  begin  with, andcl  made me
watch.
1 ^




226      PATIENCE STWONVY'S OUTIVO~S.
By and by, the woman and I, and a little boy who
jumped on to the platform, and called the conductoi
" George," with a great air of pride in the familiarity,
were. the only people left. And then it canme out that
she had but ten cents' change to pay her fare, which
should be twelve.
"I're got," she' said, looking in the young man's
honest blue eyes, and putting her hand toward the
bosom of her gown, "' a bill; it's twenty dollars; but
I took ten cents for my fare, for that was all Susannah
said it would be."
"c Never mind, mother," says George, again.  " All
right."  And took the ten cents.' I believe," says the Scotchwoman, " you must be
from the old country yourself."
"c No, I'm  a Yankee.  We aint all lean kine,
mother i"
" What did you call her' mother' for, George?"
whispered the boy, as his friend in authority pulled
the strap, and chivalrously helped the old lady clown
before the latticed porchway, and then sprang on
again while the car started.'She isn't your mother."




INTO TIIE  IOR1~NIAG.            227
"She's somebody's mother," said George.  "And
I'm somebody's son. It's all the same. The world's
all fathers and mothers and children. Don't you see?"
It was beautiful that he saw; and it did me days'
good; and in my heart I turned with it to you, as I
do with everything.
So I said to Emery Ann, "L Why not ask the mother
here to spend the winter with you? She and Rhodory
can have the little kitchen bedroom, and you can come
upstairs."
I felt as if I could do for you, dclear, if I only did for' somebody's mother."
And old M3rs. Breckenshaw and the little girl are
here; and the house has been pleasant all winter with
what ought to be in a home. It has been motherly
and daughlterly, here, again, for your sake.
Is that taking from the Lord in anything?
When their sakes are his sake,'and all the mothers
and sisters are his? -
See how I write to you, and tell and ask, as if, somehow, the -very words were to go!




228     TTPATIENCE STQRONG'S OUTINTGS.
Ml'y " outins" are all toward you.
VWhy not?  I think that all piovidiilgS for this life
show-the providings for the unseen. Did mlen piece
out God's work with their cunning device of letters
and messengers, inventing somethilng new under the
sun, the pattern of which was not in all the heavens?
Or did He put it carefully among the possibilities and
intents and the things to be, as le did the oak-seed
and the nmustard-seed?
I was thinking of it so the other clay, when word
had just come again firom  Eliphalet and Gertrude.
Of the wonderful thing it is that there should have
been a thouTht and a way put by, against the needl
of far-separated people to communicate and understand
upon the earth; of the strange, possible signs that
men were sure to find and put together as they
were to speak; and of the great system that grows
out of them; of how the whole world is busy selding, carrying, and receiving, and  the very air is
alive with the rush of its written messages, to and
fro.
Hlow it was truly meant and a part of God's plan




INTO  THE Z.ORBNI1AYG.            229
and supplement for us; as truly so, as that we should
walk about or speak to each other. And everything
beilng but a showing and a parable, it came to Ine so
surely that He will take care of our hearts, and of the
spiritual distances; and by his dear providing mlessatges do go to and f'ro; that the heavenly air is full of
loving  and helptill and remembering words; and that
each soul may get some and may send some every
clay.  "1 That which is spoken in therear in closets is
heard upon the housetops."  Out of God's mails no
letter is lost.
That is what I think about what they call " spiritualism" in these cdays. That it only cumbers itself.
That the thoutglit is so real and so sure,- that each
soul has its own so certain and direct communincg, 
that this dealing in signs and second-hand is as if, in
a land and a time when everybody knows or may
know how to write his own letters, the public scriveners
should set up their stanids, as they did in the old, untaught places and generations.  I am afraid mell may
ask for signs and cling tor theqm, and be satisfied; not
seeing the micracle; not perceiving the inner splendor,




230      PATIENCE STRONG'S OUTIVNG~S.
- the real spirit-working; the kingdom of God coming
nigh, and. already at the doors.
I wish I could put into words some inward perception of this life in which we live. This that we do
touch, and breathe, andi see; only as with our souls.
But they are the I" things in heaven above" that we
may make no graven image of. They are only spiritually discerned.
I find a word in the New Testament, - a word, indeed, of the New Testament has found me, newly, -
a word burning with its own light, and shedding its
blaze over all the gospel, from every sentence in which
it is put. A word, the letter of which is radiantly one
with its spirit; and taken simply in its letter translates to as perfect an image as things can give, the
deep, unspeakable truth.
The word is "glory."
A shining Presence.
A lightening forth of that which is always here;
the " coming" of which is as the flash " from the one
part to the other part under heaven."  The electric
fact abides; so does the spiritual. It envelopes us




INVTO THE MJIORNINGa.            231
always. When the fine, subtle conditions are met,
then, all at once, heaven and earth are full of its
brightness.  The beginning of miracles done in Cana
of Galilee " manifested it forth;" and every act and
word of the Son of Man reveals it, to that appearing
of Him  which is and shall be " in the glory of the
Father and with his angoels."
"Said I not," he asks, "' if ye would believe, ye
should see the glory of God?"  Not sign, or wonder,
or stroke of power; but disclosing; outshining of that
which filleth and worketh in all; the living nearness;
the heaven in zwhich, and not up to it from afar, we
pray as he has taught us.
That is what " glory " says to me all through the holy
pages; that is the key it is for nme to the great invisible; making it shine out of darkness with every word
of truth and every teaching of lif'e; from the prayer
that, holding not a word too much or unavailing,
begins with no mere ceremony of address, but with
a sentence put into our lips to make us feel all heaven
about us, and ourselves face to face with the Father in
his holy place, beseeching for his kingdoms of outer




232      PAiTIEVCE STRONG'S O UTIIVS.
and inmost to be both made one, - to the hope of the
city that shall have no need of the sun, because the
glory of God shall lighten it.
The Easter flowers are in the window; and the
Easter joy is in my heart.
I shall not always be blind; I feel what touches
nme.
Even the Son of Maln who came clown from heaven
and who was in heaven, bore also the conditions of the
flesh. Eveh after his resurrection he had not fully
" ascended." IHe touched that realmn as we touch it;
it was close and warm about him; he knew that at
any moment he might ask of the Father and have
twelve legions of angels; yet only now and thern they
"G appeared" out of the glory, strengthening him visibly; or "~  out of the excellent glory " Cal3 the loving,
audible voice of God.
Can we not wait as he waited?
Oh, I believe that there is no awoay; that no love,
no life, goes ever froiom us; it goes as HI-e went, that it
mny come again, deeper and closer and surer; and be
with us always, even to the end of the world.




IiVTO THIE MOR1NlINV&.           233
" Out of the body, to God."  That shall be the last
outgoing; the everlasting entering in.
That is what we wait for, —the adoption; the
redemption of our body; the full manifestation of the
sons of God.
That is what shall certainly come in my turn, even
to me also: the outgoing of the morning; the instant
flowering of this life into the larger; the new birthday; and as we found each other here, when this life
was to be for us, so surely your face waiting for me
there, 
Mlotherdie i