Seaboard Parish, vol 1 | Page 9

sick
chamber by the man who believes that the heart of a loving Father is at
the centre of things, that he is light all about the darkness, and that he
will not only bring good out of evil at last, but will be with the sufferer
all the time, making endurance possible, and pain tolerable. There are a
thousand alleviations that people do not often think of, coming from
God himself. Would you not say, for instance, that time must pass very
slowly in pain? But have you never observed, or has no one ever made
the remark to you, how strangely fast, even in severe pain, the time
passes after all?
"We will do all we can, will we not," I went on, "to make her as
comfortable as possible? You, Dora, must attend to your little brothers,
that your mother may not have too much to think about now that she
will have Connie to nurse."
They could not say much, but they both kissed me, and went away
leaving me to understand clearly enough that they had quite understood
me. I then returned to the sick chamber, where I found that the poor
child had fallen asleep.
My wife and I watched by her bedside on alternate nights, until the pain
had so far subsided, and the fever was so far reduced, that we could
allow Wynnie to take a share in the office. We could not think of
giving her over to the care of any but one of ourselves during the night.
Her chief suffering came from its being necessary that she should keep

nearly one position on her back, because of her spine, while the
external bruise and the swelling of the muscles were in consequence so
painful, that it needed all that mechanical contrivance could do to
render the position endurable. But these outward conditions were
greatly ameliorated before many days were over.
This is a dreary beginning of my story, is it not? But sickness of all
kinds is such a common thing in the world, that it is well sometimes to
let our minds rest upon it, lest it should take us altogether at unawares,
either in ourselves or our friends, when it comes. If it were not a good
thing in the end, surely it would not be; and perhaps before I have done
my readers will not be sorry that my tale began so gloomily. The
sickness in Judaea eighteen hundred and thirty-five years ago, or
thereabouts, has no small part in the story of him who came to put all
things under our feet. Praise be to him for evermore!
It soon became evident to me that that room was like a new and more
sacred heart to the house. At first it radiated gloom to the remotest
corners; but soon rays of light began to appear mingling with the gloom.
I could see that bits of news were carried from it to the servants in the
kitchen, in the garden, in the stable, and over the way to the home-farm.
Even in the village, and everywhere over the parish, I was received
more kindly, and listened to more willingly, because of the trouble I
and my family were in; while in the house, although we had never been
anything else than a loving family, it was easy to discover that we all
drew more closely together in consequence of our common anxiety.
Previous to this, it had been no unusual thing to see Wynnie and Dora
impatient with each other; for Dora was none the less a wild, somewhat
lawless child, that she was a profoundly affectionate one. She rather
resembled her cousin Judy, in fact--whom she called Aunt Judy, and
with whom she was naturally a great favourite. Wynnie, on the other
hand, was sedate, and rather severe--more severe, I must in justice say,
with herself than with anyone else. I had sometimes wished, it is true,
that her mother, in regard to the younger children, were more like her;
but there I was wrong. For one of the great goods that come of having
two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies the motions of the
other. No one is good but God. No one holds the truth, or can hold it, in
one and the same thought, but God. Our human life is often, at best, but
an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth; and

it is not a bad thing in a family, that the pendulums of father and
mother should differ in movement so far, that when the one is at one
extremity of the swing, the other should be at the other, so that they
meet only in the point of _indifference_, in the middle; that the
predominant