your time.--Oh! these
boys, these boys!" The minister's voice quavered. "We give them our
very life-blood. We love them, cherish them, pray over them, do our
best to guide them, yet they take the path that leads from home. In
some way, God knows how, we fail to call out the return love, or even
the filial duty and respect!--Well, we won't talk about it, Reba; my
business is to breathe the breath of life into my text: 'Here am I,
Lord, send me!' Letty certainly continues to say it heroically,
whatever her troubles."

"Yes, Letty is so ready for service that she will always be sent, till
the end of time; but if David ever has an interview with his Creator
I can hear him say: 'Here am I, Lord; send Letty!'"

The minister laughed again. He laughed freely and easily nowadays. His
first wife had been a sort of understudy for a saint, and after a
brief but depressing connubial experience she had died, leaving him
with a boy of six; a boy who already, at that tender age, seemed to
cherish a passionate aversion to virtue in any form--the result,
perhaps, of daily doses of the catechism administered by an abnormally
pious mother.

The minister had struggled valiantly with his paternal and parochial
cares for twelve lonely years when he met, wooed, and won (very much
to his astonishment and exaltation) Reba Crosby. There never was a
better bargain driven! She was forty-five by the family Bible but
twenty-five in face, heart, and mind, while he would have been printed
as sixty in "Who's Who in New Hampshire" although he was far older in
patience and experience and wisdom. The minister was spiritual, frail,
and a trifle prone to self-depreciation; the minister's new wife was
spirited, vigorous, courageous, and clever. She was also Western-born,
college-bred, good as gold, and invincibly, incurably gay. The
minister grew younger every year, for Reba doubled his joys and halved
his burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other
as if they were feathers. She swept into the quiet village life of
Beulah like a salt sea breeze. She infused a new spirit into the bleak
church "sociables" and made them positively agreeable functions. The
choir ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and
flourished like a green bay tree. She managed the deacons, she braced
up the missionary societies, she captivated the parish, she cheered
the depressed and depressing old ladies and cracked jokes with the
invalids.