“You always judged David a little severely, Reba.  Don’t despair of reforming any man till you see the grass growing over his bare bones.  I always have a soft spot in my heart for him when I remember his friendship for my Dick; but that was before your time.—­Oh! these boys, these boys!” The minister’s voice quavered.  “We give them our very life-blood.  We love them, cherish them, pray over them, do our best to guide them, yet they take the path that leads from home.  In some way, God knows how, we fail to call out the return love, or even the filial duty and respect!—­Well, we won’t talk about it, Reba; my business is to breathe the breath of life into my text:  ’Here am I, Lord, send me!’ Letty certainly continues to say it heroically, whatever her troubles.”

“Yes, Letty is so ready for service that she will always be sent, till the end of time; but if David ever has an interview with his Creator I can hear him say:  ‘Here am I, Lord; send Letty!’”

The minister laughed again.  He laughed freely and easily nowadays.  His first wife had been a sort of understudy for a saint, and after a brief but depressing connubial experience she had died, leaving him with a boy of six; a boy who already, at that tender age, seemed to cherish a passionate aversion to virtue in any form—­the result, perhaps, of daily doses of the catechism administered by an abnormally pious mother.

The minister had struggled valiantly with his paternal and parochial cares for twelve lonely years when he met, wooed, and won (very much to his astonishment and exaltation) Reba Crosby.  There never was a better bargain driven!  She was forty-five by the family Bible but twenty-five in face, heart, and mind, while he would have been printed as sixty in “Who’s Who in New Hampshire” although he was far older in patience and experience and wisdom.  The minister was spiritual, frail, and a trifle prone to self-depreciation; the minister’s new wife was spirited, vigorous, courageous, and clever.  She was also Western-born, college-bred, good as gold, and invincibly, incurably gay.  The minister grew younger every year, for Reba doubled his joys and halved his burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other as if they were feathers.  She swept into the quiet village life of Beulah like a salt sea breeze.  She infused a new spirit into the bleak church “sociables” and made them positively agreeable functions.  The choir ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and flourished like a green bay tree.  She managed the deacons, she braced up the missionary societies, she captivated the parish, she cheered the depressed and depressing old ladies and cracked jokes with the invalids.

“Ain’t she a little mite too jolly for a minister’s wife?” questioned Mrs. Ossian Popham, who was a professional pessimist.

“If this world is a place of want, woe, wantonness, an’ wickedness, same as you claim, Maria, I don’t see how a minister’s wife can be too jolly!” was her husband’s cheerful reply.  “Look how she’s melted up the ice in both congregations, so’t the other church is most willin’ we should prosper, so long as Mis’ Larrabee stays here an’ we don’t get too fur ahead of ’em in attendance.  Me for the smiles, Maria!”