harsh as seems now her rule, we have
yet to see whether women will be born of modern systems of tolerance and
indulgence equal to those grand ones of the olden times whose places now
know them no more. The inconceivable austerity and solemnity with which
Puritanism invested this mortal life, the awful grandeur of the themes
which it made household words, the sublimity of the issues which it hung
upon the commonest acts of our earthly existence, created characters of
more than Roman strength and greatness; and the good men and women of
Puritan training excelled the saints of the Middle Ages, as a soul fully
developed intellectually, educated to closest thought, and exercised in
reasoning, is superior to a soul great merely through impulse and
sentiment.

"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
roistering 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 us