the woods; besides these, only the clouds in the sky.  She could not lift her food to her mouth; she could not be her husband’s working partner.  She never went into another woman’s house to see her works and ways, but sat there, aching and tired, vexed by flies and by heat, and isolated in long storms.  Yet the whole countryside neighbored her with true affection.  Her spirit grew stronger as her body grew weaker, and the doctors, who grieved because they could do so little with their skill, were never confronted by that malady of the spirit, a desire for ease and laziness, which makes the soundest of bodies useless and complaining.  The thought of her blooms in one’s mind like the whitest of flowers; it makes one braver and more thankful to remember the simple faith and patience with which she bore her pain and trouble.  How often she must have said, “I wish I could do something for you in return,” when she was doing a thousand times more than if, like her neighbors, she followed the simple round of daily life!  She was doing constant kindness by her example; but nobody can tell the woe of her long days and nights, the solitude of her spirit, as she was being lifted by such hard ways to the knowledge of higher truth and experience.  Think of her pain when, one after another, her children fell ill and died, and she could not tend them!  And now, in the same worn chair where she lived and slept sat her husband, helpless too, thinking of her, and missing her more than if she had been sometimes away from home, like other women.  Even a stranger would miss her in the house.

There sat the old farmer looking down the lane in his turn, bearing his afflictions with a patient sternness that may have been born of watching his wife’s serenity.  There was a half-withered rose lying within his reach.  Some days nobody came up the lane, and the wild birds that ventured near the house and the clouds that blew over were his only entertainment.  He had a fine face, of the older New England type, clean-shaven and strong-featured,—­a type that is fast passing away.  He might have been a Cumberland dalesman, such were his dignity, and self-possession, and English soberness of manner.  His large frame was built for hard work, for lifting great weights and pushing his plough through new-cleared land.  We felt at home together, and each knew many things that the other did of earlier days, and of losses that had come with time.  I remembered coming to the old house often in my childhood; it was in this very farm lane that I first saw anemones, and learned what to call them.  After we drove away, this crippled man must have thought a long time about my elders and betters, as if he were reading their story out of a book.  I suppose he has hauled many a stick of timber pine down for ship-yards, and gone through the village so early in the winter morning that I, waking in my warm bed, only heard the sleds creak through the frozen snow as the slow oxen plodded by.