r children. Sons and
daughters were welcomed into the Owen homestead, and the wide halls
and great rooms of the rambling country house rang with the voices of
children. Three of these little ones slipped back to Heaven before the
portals had closed. The stricken parents with blinded eyes met only
the rayless emptiness of unbelief. May God help the mother, fainting
beneath a bereavement greater than she can bear, who cries for help
and finds none; who stretches her empty arms upward in an agony of
appeal and is answered by the hollow echo of her own cry; may God help
her, for she is beyond the help of man. Other children came to fill
the vacant places, other voices filled the air, but the hearts of
father and mother were not filled until years later, when a sweet
faith thrilled the hopeless blank.

The story of these two is the story of many beside. Husband and wife
began the long journey side by side with equal talent, hope, energy;
his work led him along the high-road, hers lay in a quiet nook; his
name became world-known, hers was scarcely heard beyond the precinct
of her own village; and yet who can say that his life was the more
successful, who can say that the quiet falling rain, with its slow
resultant of flower and fruit in each little garden nook, is less
important than the mighty ship-laden river bearing its wealth of
commerce in triumph to the sea?

George Eliot, in "Middlemarch," says of Dorothea:

Her finely-touched spirit had its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible.... The effect of her being on those around
her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world
is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not
so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in
unvisited tombs.

This is true of many Dorotheas; it is true of the Dorothea of whom I
am writing. Geographically, Mary Owen's field of labor was narrow; but
a small Western village of a thousand souls may hold within its
ethical strata all the developments of a continent. Let her who feels
that her small limits imprison her, remember that emotions are not
registered by the census. Lovers and business men, struggling youths
and perplexed mothers, children and veterans, poured their griefs and
fears, their hopes and disappointments, into the listening ear of
sympathy, knowing that the clear judgment of