Happy years leave slender records; but for suffering and sin there would
not be history. The winter came, and the spring came, and the summer and
the autumn, and no face in the quiet little parsonage looked a shade older
for the year that had gone; no incident had taken place which could make a
salient point in a story, and not one of the peaceful hearts could believe
that a twelvemonth had flown. Elder Kinney's pathetic fears lest he might
love his Saviour less by reason of his new happiness, had melted like
frost in early sunlight, in the sweet presence of Draxy's child-like
religion.

"O Draxy!" he said again and again, "seems to me I never half loved all
these souls we are working for, before I had you. I don't see how I could
have been so afraid about it before we were married."

"Do I really help you, Mr. Kinney?" Draxy would reply, with a lingering
emphasis on the "really," which made her husband draw her closer to him
and forget to speak: "It seems very strange to me that I can. I feel so
ignorant about souls. It frightens me to answer the smallest question the
people ask me. I never do, in any way except to tell them if I have ever
felt so myself, and how God seemed to help me out."

Blessed Draxy! that was the secret of her influence from first to last:
the magnetic sympathy of a pure and upright soul, to whose rare strength
had been added still rarer simplicity and lovingness. Old and young, men
as well as women, came to her with unhesitating confidence. Before her
marriage, they had all felt a little reserve with her, partly because she
was of finer grain than they, partly because she had, deep down in her
soul, a genuine shyness which showed itself only in quiet reticence. But
now that she was the Elder's wife, they felt that she was in a measure
theirs. There is a very sweet side, as well as an inconvenient and