MISS NANCY SAWYER.
In a little old cottage in Lewisburg, on one of the streets which was
never traveled except by a solitary cow seeking pasture or a countryman
bringing wood to some one of the half-dozen families living in it, and
which in summer was decked with a profusion of the yellow and white
blossoms of the dog-fennel--in this unfrequented street, so generously
and unnecessarily broad, lived Miss Nancy Sawyer and her younger sister
Semantha. Miss Nancy was a providence, one of those old maids that are
benedictions to the whole town; one of those in whom the mother-love,
wanting the natural objects on which to spend itself, overflows all
bounds and lavishes itself on every needy thing, and grows richer and
more abundant with the spending, a fountain of inexhaustible blessing.
There is no nobler life possible to any one than to an unmarried woman.
The more shame that some choose a selfish one, and thus turn to gall all
the affection with which they are endowed. Miss Nancy Sawyer had been
Ralph's Sunday-school teacher, and it was precious little, so far as
information went, that he learned from her; for she never could conceive
of Jerusalem as a place in any essential regard very different from
Lewisburg, where she had spent her life. But Ralph learned from her what
most Sunday-school teachers fail to teach, the great lesson of
Christianity, by the side of which all antiquities and geographies and
chronologies and exegetics and other niceties are as nothing.
And now he turned the head of the roan toward the cottage of Miss Nancy
Sawyer as naturally as the roan would have gone to his own stall in the
stable at home. The snow had gradually ceased to fall, and was eddying
round the house, when Ralph dismounted from his foaming horse, and,
carrying the still form of Shocky as reverently as though it had been
something heavenly, knocked at Miss Nancy Sawyer's door.
With natural feminine instinct that lady started back when she saw
Hartsook, for she had just built a fire in the stove, and she now stood
at the door with unwashed face and uncombed hair.
"Why, Ralph Hartsook, where did you drop down from--and what have you
got?"
"I came from Flat Creek this morning, and I brought you a little angel
who has got out of heaven, and needs some of your motherly care."
Shocky was brought in. The chill shook him now by fits only, for a fever
had spotted his cheeks already.
"Who are you?" said Miss Nancy, as she unwrapped him.
"I'm Shocky, a little boy as God forgot, and then thought of again."