escapes, in the early days of abolitionism, which it was a marvel she
could tell with so little implication that she had shown courage. She
had roamed through certain parts of the South, carrying the Bible to the
slave; and more than one of her companions, in the course of these
expeditions, had been tarred and feathered. She herself, at one season,
had spent a month in a Georgian jail. She had preached temperance in
Irish circles where the doctrine was received with missiles; she had
interfered between wives and husbands mad with drink; she had taken
filthy children, picked up in the street, to her own poor rooms, and had
removed their pestilent rags and washed their sore bodies with slippery
little hands. In her own person she appeared to Olive and Verena a
representative of suffering humanity; the pity they felt for her was
part of their pity for all who were weakest and most hardly used; and it
struck Miss Chancellor (more especially) that this frumpy little
missionary was the last link in a tradition, and that when she should be
called away the heroic age of New England life--the age of plain living
and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion
and noble experiment--would effectually be closed. It was the perennial
freshness of Miss Birdseye's faith that had had such a contagion for
these modern maidens, the unquenched flame of her transcendentalism, the
simplicity of her vision, the way in which, in spite of mistakes,
deceptions, the changing fashions of reform, which make the remedies of
a previous generation look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the only
thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of the species by
the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple. Olive
had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had
scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into
rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the
neighbours turn pale. But she reflected that after such exertions she
had the refreshment of a pretty house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a
crackling hearth, where she threw in pine-cones and made them snap, an
imported tea-service, a Chickering piano, and the _Deutsche Rundschau_;
whereas Miss Birdseye had only a bare, vulgar room, with a hideous
flowered carpet (it looked like a dentist's), a cold furnace, the
evening paper, and Doctor Prance. Olive and Verena were present at
another of he