ucky, under the preaching of the
Reverend Peleg Dawson, and when she married my father and went to bury
herself in the wilds of "Up Sandy" was a shining light in the Methodist
church, a class-leader who had had and had told experiences.

But all that glory was over now; it had flashed its little day: for
there is a glow in the excitement of our religious revivals as potent in
its effect on the imaginations of women and young men as ever were the
fastings and penances which brought the dreams and reveries, the holy
visions and the glorious revealings, of the Catholic votaries. In this
short, triumphant time of spiritual pride lay the whole romance of my
step-mother's life. Perhaps it was well for her soul that she was taken
from the scene of her triumphs and brought again to the hard realities
of life. The self-exaltation, the ungodly pride passed away; but there
was left the earnest, prayerful desire to do her duty in her way and
calling, and the first path of duty which opened to her zeal was that
which led to the care of a motherless child, the saving of an immortal
soul. And in all sincerity and uprightness did she strive to walk in it.
But what woman of five-and-thirty, who has outlived her youth and
womanly tenderness in the loneliness and hardening influences of a
single life, and who marries at last for a shelter in old age, knows the
wants of a little child? Indeed, what but a mother's love has the
long-enduring patience to support the never ceasing calls for
forbearance and perseverance which a child makes upon a grown person?
Those little ones need the nourishment of love and praise, but such milk
for babes can come only from a mother's breast. I got none of it. On the
contrary, my dearly loved independence, my wild-wood life, where Nature
had become to me my nursing-mother, was exchanged for one of never
ceasing supervision. "Little girls must learn to be useful," was the
phrase that greeted my unwilling ears fifty times a day, which pursued
me through my daily round of dish-washings, floor-sweepings, bed-making
and potato-peeling, to overtake me at last in the very moment when I
hoped to reap the reward of my diligence in a free afternoon by the
river-side in the crotch of the water-maple that hung over the stream,
clutching me and fastening me down to the hated square of patchwork,
which bore, in the spots of red that defaced its white purity in
following the line of my stitches, the marks of the wounds that