to death, as
it has certain others as noble. When dying, she said some gay thing
which disturbed a dear friend. The sufferer, well knowing her own state,
looked up. "I must laugh, dear," she said; "I would not feel that the
other world was the good place I think it if I did not believe I could
laugh there too." She once said to me, in the midst of a storm of acute
suffering, that pain seemed to her a strange sort of a joke. I hardly
knew what she meant, but it shows the reigning mood of one who used to
better ends a life half pain than most of us use the untroubled health
of existence. Very irritable in youth, her clear brain and strong sense
of duty overcame it in proportion to the growth of what in others
creates it. All opiates she disliked, and could rarely be induced to
take them. "If my mind gets weaker, I shall go to pieces----;" and,
laughing always, "the bits would be worthless as the scattered bricks of
a sound house." Surely such a life is a fruitful lesson in the uses of
endurance, for be sure that both she and all around her were the better
and happier, yes, and she the less a sufferer, for her mode of dealing
with a life of pain.

The illustration I have given saves me from dwelling at great length on
the values of all the means within a woman's control for lessening the
evil consequences of suffering, and if to few is given the largest moral
and mental outfit for such a struggle, none are without the power to
cultivate what they have, and, in the lesser ills of life, to make use
of the lesson we may hope and know few will be called on to apply to an
existence such as hers.

Pain of body, hurt of mind, all the sad gamut from discomfort to
anguish, depend for their influence on her life upon how nature and
training enable the woman to meet them.

To endure without excess of emotion saves her from consequent
nervousness, and from that feebleness of mind and body which craves at
all cost instant relief. It is the spoiled child, untaught to endure,
who becomes the self-pampered woman. Endurance of pain has also its
side-values, and is the handmaid of courage and of a large range of
duties. Tranquil endurance enables the sufferer to seek and to use all
the means of distraction which this woman I have described did use. It
leaves the mind free, as it never can be otherwise in the storm of
unrestraint, to reason on her troubles, and to decide whether or not her
pain justifies the use of drugs, for on her the