The minister was away at Presbytery meeting in Montreal, and for ten
days his wife would stand in the breach. Of course the elders would take
the meeting on the Sabbath day and on the Wednesday evening, but for all
other ministerial duties when the minister was absent the congregation
looked to the minister's wife. And soon it came that the sick and the
sorrowing and the sin-burdened found in the minister's wife such help
and comfort and guidance as made the absence of the minister seem no
great trial after all. Eight years ago the minister had brought his wife
from a home of gentle culture, from a life of intellectual and artistic
pursuits, and from a circle of loving friends of which she was the pride
and joy, to this home in the forest. There, isolated from all congenial
companionship with her own kind, deprived of all the luxuries and of
many of the comforts of her young days, and of the mental stimulus of
that contact of minds without which few can maintain intellectual life,
she gave herself without stint to her husband's people, with never a
thought of self-pity or self-praise. By day and by night she labored for
her husband and family and for her people, for she thought them hers.
She taught the women how to adorn their rude homes, gathered them into
Bible classes and sewing circles, where she read and talked and wrought
and prayed with them till they grew to adore her as a saint, and to
trust her as a leader and friend, and to be a little like her. And not
the women only, but the men, too, loved and trusted her, and the big
boys found it easier to talk to the minister's wife than to the minister
or to any of his session. She made her own and her children's clothes,
collars, hats, and caps, her husband's shirts and neckties, toiling late
into the morning hours, and all without frown or shadow of complaint,
and indeed without suspicion that any but the happiest lot was hers, or
that she was, as her sisters said, "just buried alive in the backwoods."
Not she! She lived to serve, and the where and how were not hers to