ksome. I had so many cares that the company I needed for
intellectual stimulus was a trial rather than a pleasure.

There was quite an Irish settlement at a short distance, and continual
complaints were coming to me that my boys threw stones at their pigs,
cows, and the roofs of their houses. This involved constant diplomatic
relations in the settlement of various difficulties, in which I was so
successful that, at length, they constituted me a kind of umpire in all
their own quarrels. If a drunken husband was pounding his wife, the
children would run for me. Hastening to the scene of action, I would
take Patrick by the collar, and, much to his surprise and shame, make
him sit down and promise to behave himself. I never had one of them
offer the least resistance, and in time they all came to regard me as
one having authority. I strengthened my influence by cultivating good
feeling. I lent the men papers to read, and invited their children into
our grounds; giving them fruit, of which we had abundance, and my
children's old clothes, books, and toys. I was their physician,
also--with my box of homeopathic medicines I took charge of the men,
women, and children in sickness. Thus the most amicable relations were
established, and, in any emergency, these poor neighbors were good
friends and always ready to serve me.

But I found police duty rather irksome, especially when called out dark
nights to prevent drunken fathers from disturbing their sleeping
children, or to minister to poor mothers in the pangs of maternity.
Alas! alas! who can measure the mountains of sorrow and suffering
endured in unwelcome motherhood in the abodes of ignorance, poverty,
and vice, where terror-stricken women and children are the victims of
strong men frenzied with passion and intoxicating drink?

Up to this time life had glided by with comparative ease, but now the
real struggle was upon me. My duties were too numerous and varied, and
none sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into play my
higher faculties. I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty
stomach, is very depressing. I had books, but no stimulating
companionship. To add to my general dissatisfaction at the change from
Boston, I found that Seneca Falls was a malarial region, and in due time
all the children were attacked with chills and fever which, under
homeopathic treatment in those days, lasted three months. The servants
were afflicted in the same way. Clean