life into effect. She touched feelingly on the sacrifice
she and her family had had to make in order that she might maintain the
readings, and alluded to her confidence that if Providence intended her
to go forward, provision would be made for her and her children, whom
she solemnly committed by an act of faith, like that of the mother of
Moses, to the care of the Almighty. She said this with deep solemnity,
holding up her hands toward heaven as though to lay an infant in the
arms of the Good Shepherd. The vision of a house-mother trusting the
Lord even for the darning of stockings was an example of faith that
touched the hearers. Under the lead of a few active women in the company
a purse of two hundred dollars was collected and presented to her. It
was done delicately; the givers stated that their purpose was simply to
enable her to relieve herself of care that the good work might not
suffer. The money was thus handed not to her but to the Lord, and Mrs.
Frankland could not refuse it. Do you blame her? She had earned it as
fairly as the rector of St. James the Less earned his. Perhaps even more
fairly, for her service was spontaneous and enthusiastic; he had grown
old and weary, and his service had long since come to be mainly
perfunctory.

There are cynics who imagine a woman with a mission saying, "Well, I've
increased my husband's business, and I have made two hundred very
necessary dollars this winter; and I will try it again." If the matter
had presented itself to her mind in that way Mrs. Frankland probably
would have felt a repulsion from the work she was doing. It is a very
bungling mind, or a more than usually clear and candid mind, that would
view a delicate personal concern in so blunt a fashion. Mrs. Frankland's
mind was too clever to be bungling, and too emotional and imaginative to
be critical. What she saw, with a rush of grateful emotion, was that the
Divine approval of her sacrifices was manifested by this sustaining
increase of temporal prosperity. The ravens of Elijah had replenished
her purse because she trusted. Thus commended from above and lifted into
the circle of those who like the prophets and apostles have a special
vocation, she felt herself ready, as she put it, "to go forward through
fire and flood if need be." It would not have been like her to remember
that the fire and flood to be encountered in her career could be only
rhetorical at best--painted fire and a stage flood.

Among those