"My earliest recollections of Aunt Esther, for so our saint was known,
were of a bright-faced, cheerful, witty, quick-moving little
middle-aged person, who came into our house like a good fairy whenever
there was a call of sickness or trouble. If an accident happened in
the great roystering family of eight or ten children (and when was not
something happening to some of us?), and we were shut up in a
sick-room, then duly as daylight came the quick step and cheerful face
of Aunt Esther,--not solemn and lugubrious like so many sick-room
nurses, but with a never failing flow of wit and story that could
beguile even the most doleful into laughing at their own afflictions.
I remember how a fit of the quinsy--most tedious of all sicknesses to
an active child--was gilded and glorified into quite a fete by my
having Aunt Esther all to myself for two whole days, with nothing to
do but amuse me. She charmed me into smiling at the very pangs which
had made me weep before, and of which she described her own
experiences in a manner to make me think that, after all, the quinsy
was something with an amusing side to it. Her knowledge of all sorts
of medicines, gargles, and alleviatives, her perfect familiarity with
every canon and law of good nursing and tending, was something that
could only have come from long experience in those good old New
England days when there were no nurses recognized as a class in the
land, but when watching and the care of the sick were among those
offices of Christian life which the families of a neighborhood
reciprocally rendered each other. Even from early youth she had obeyed
a special vocation as sister of charity in many a sick-room, and, with
the usual keen intelligence of New England, had widened her powers of
doing good by the reading of medical and physiological works. Her
legends of nursing in those days of long typhus fever and other
formidable and protracted forms of disease were to our ears quite
wonderful, and we regarded her as a sort of patron saint of the
sick-room. She seemed always so cheerful, so bright, and so devoted,
that it never occurred to us youngsters to doubt that she enjoyed,
above all things, being with us, waiting on us all day, watching over
us by night, telling us stories, and answering, in her lively and
always amusing and instructive way, that incessant fire of questions
with which a child persecutes a grown person.

"Sometimes, as a reward of goodness, we were allowed t