21. CHAPTER XXI.
MISS NANCY SAWYER.
IN a little old cottage in Lewisburg, on one of the
streets which was never traveled except by a solitary
cow seeking pasture or a countryman bringing
wood to some one of the half-dozen families living in
it, and which in summer was decked with a profusion
of the yellow and white blossoms of the dog-fennel—in this unfrequented
street, so generously and unnecessarily broad, lived
Miss Nancy Sawyer and her younger sister Semantha. Miss
Nancy was a providence, one of those old maids that are benedictions
to the whole town; one of those in whom the mother-love,
wanting the natural objects on which to spend itself, overflows
all bounds and lavishes itself on every needy thing, and
grows richer and more abundant with the spending, a fountain
of inexhaustible blessing. There is no nobler life possible to any
one than to an unmarried woman. The more shame that some
choose a selfish one, and thus turn to gall all the affection with
which they are endowed. Miss Nancy Sawyer had been Ralph's
[ILLUSTRATION]
MISS NANCY SAWYER.
[Description: 556EAF. Page 154. In-line engraving of a figure looking
out through a door at a snowstorm.]
Sunday-school teacher, and it was precious little, so far as information
went, that he learned from her, for she never could conceive
of Jerusalem as a place in any essential regard very different from
Lewisburg, where she had spent her life. But Ralph learned
from her what most Sunday-school teachers fail to teach, the
great lesson of Christianity, by the side of which all antiquities
and geographies and chronologies and exergetics and other niceties
are as nothing.
And now he turned the head of the roan toward the cottage
of Miss Nancy Sawyer as naturally as the roan would have gone
to his own stall in the stable at home. The snow had gradually
ceased to fall, and was eddying round the house, when Ralph dismounted
from his foaming horse, and, carrying the still form of
Shocky as reverently as though he had been something heavenly,
knocked at Miss Nancy Sawyer's door.
With natural feminine instinct that lady started back when she
saw Hartsook, for she had just built a fire in the stove, and she
now stood at the door with unwashed face and uncombed hair.
“Why, Ralph Hartsook, where did you drop down from—and
what have you got?”
“I came from Flat Creek this morning, and I brought you a
little angel who has got out of heaven, and needs some of your
motherly care.”
Shocky was brought in. The chill shook him now by fits only,
for a fever had spotted his cheeks already.
“Who are you?” said Miss Nancy, as she unwrapped him.
“I'm Shocky, a little boy as God forgot, and then thought of
again.”
