to whom jeweled hand after jeweled hand was offered in marriage, but
who stayed on the old place because of the sense of filial obligation
until the health was gone and the attractiveness of personal presence
had vanished. Brutal society may call such a one by a nickname. God
calls her daughter, and Heaven calls her saint, and I call her
domestic martyr. A half dozen ordinary women have not as much nobility
as could be found in the smallest joint of the little finger of her
left hand. Although the world has stood six thousand years, this is
the first apotheosis of maidenhood, although in the long line of those
who have declined marriage that they might be qualified for some
especial mission are the names of Anna Ross, and Margaret
Breckinridge, and Mary Shelton, and Anna Etheridge, and Georgiana
Willetts, the angels of the battlefields of Fair Oaks, and Lookout
Mountain, and Chancellorsville, and Cooper Shop Hospital: and though
single life has been honored by the fact that the three grandest men
of the Bible--John and Paul and Christ--were