n proceeded with his train of
thought.

"Papa, papa! the teakettle! only look!" cried all the younger ones, just
as he was again beginning to abstract his mind.

Mr. Stanton rose, and adapting part of his sermon paper to the handle of
the teakettle, poured the boiling water on some herb drink for his wife,
and then recommenced.

"I sha'n't have much of a sermon!" he soliloquized, as his youngest but
one, with the ingenuity common to children of her standing, had
contrived to tip herself over in her chair, and cut her under lip, which
for the time being threw the whole settlement into commotion; and this
conviction was strengthened by finding that it was now time to give the
children their dinner.

"I fear Mrs. Stanton is imprudent in exerting herself," said the medical
man to the husband, as he examined her symptoms.

"I know she is," replied her husband, "but I cannot keep her from it."

"It is absolutely indispensable that she should rest and keep her mind
easy," said the doctor.

"Rest and keep easy"--how easily the words are said! yet how they fall
on the ear of a mother, who knows that her whole flock have not yet a
garment prepared for winter, that hiring assistance is out of the
question, and that the work must all be done by herself--who sees that
while she is sick her husband is perplexed, and kept from his
appropriate duties, and her children, despite his well-meant efforts,
suffering for the want of those attentions that only a mother can give.
Will not any mother, so tried, rise from her sick bed before she feels
able, to be again prostrated by over-exertion, until the vigor of the
constitution year by year declines, and she sinks into an early grave?
Yet this is the true history of many a wife and mother, who, in
consenting to share the privations of a western minister, has as truly
sacrificed her life as did ever martyr on heathen shores. The graves of
Harriet Newell and Mrs. Judson are hallowed as the shrines of saints,
and their memory made as a watchword among Christians; yet the western
valley is full of green and nameless graves, where patient,
long-enduring wives and mothers have lain down, worn out by the
privations of as severe a missionary field, and "no man knoweth the
place of their sepulchre."

The crisp air of a November evening was enlivened by the fire that
blazed merrily in the bar room of the tavern in L., while a more than
usual number crowded about the hearth, owing to the sess