ers" on their
twenty-first birthday. And thus it was that, when I was born, Aunt Judy
was as much freer than her "boy" is now, as simple, natural wants are
freer than impatient, artificial appetites.

But that was the beginning and the end of Aunt Judy's freedom. For all
the change it wrought in her feelings and her ways toward us, or in ours
toward her, she might as well have remained the slave and the baby she
was born; the old relations, so natural and gentle, of affection and
faithful service on her side, of affection and grateful care on ours, no
mere legal forms could alter: no papers could disturb their
peacefulness, no privileges impair their confidence. Indeed, that same
freedom--or at least her personal interest in it--was matter of
magnificent contempt to both nurse and child; she understood it too well
to pet it, I understood it too little to be jealous of it. It was only
by asking her that you could discover that Aunt Judy was free; it was
only by being asked that she could recollect it. For her, freedom meant
the right to "go where she pleased"; but her love knew no _where_ but my
father's roof and her darling's crib, nor anything so wrong as that
right. For us, her freedom meant our freedom, the right to send her away
when we chose; but our love knew no such _when_ in all the shameful
possibilities of time, nor anything in all the cruel conspiracies of
ingratitude so wrong as that right. Could we entreat her to leave us, or
to return from following after us, when each of our hearts had spoken
and said, "The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part
thee and me"? So she and I have gone on together ever since, and shall
go on, until we come to the Bethlehem of love at rest. What though she
had been there before we started, and were there now? To the saints and
their eternal spaceless spirits there are nor days, nor miles, nor
starting-points, nor resting-places, nor journey's ends.

From my earliest remembered observation, when I first began to "take
notice," as nurses say of vague babies, with pinafore comparison and
judgment, Aunt Judy was an old woman; I knew that, because she had
explained to me why I had not wrinkles like hers, and why she could not
read her precious Bible without spectacles, as I could, and why my back
was not bent too, and how if I lived I would grow so. From such
instructions I derived a blurred, bewildering notion that from me to
her, suffering an Aunt-Judy change,