The shadow of some old struggle seemed to come over Miss Sampson's face, as she answered, briefly:
"I wanted to find the very toughest sort of a job to do."
Faith looked up, surprised.
"But I heard you tell my father that you had been nursing more than twenty years. You must have been quite a young woman when you began. I wonder—"
"You wonder why I wasn't like most other young women, I suppose. Why I didn't get married, perhaps, and have folks of my own to take care of? Well, I didn't; and the Lord gave me a pretty plain indication that He hadn't laid out that kind of a life for me. So then I just looked around to find out what better He had for me to do. And I hit on the very work I wanted. A trade that it took all the old Sampson grit to follow. I made up my mind, as the doctor says, that somebody in the world had got to choose drumsticks, and I might as well take hold of one."
"But don't you ever get tired of it all, and long for something to rest or amuse you?"
"Amuse! I couldn't be amused, child. I've been in too much awful earnest ever to be much amused again. No, I want to die in the harness. It's hard work I want. I couldn't have been tied down to a common, easy sort of life. I want something to fight and grapple with; and I'm thankful there's been a way opened for me to do good according to my nature. If I hadn't had sickness and death to battle against, I should have got into human quarrels, maybe, just for the sake of feeling ferocious."
"And you always take the very worst and hardest cases, Dr. Gracie says."
"What's the use of taking a tough job if you don't face the toughest part of it? I don't want the comfortable end of the business. Somebody's got to nurse smallpox, and yellow fever, and raving-distracted people; and I know the Lord made me fit to do just that very work. There ain't many that He does make for it, but I'm one. And if I shirked, there'd be a stitch dropped."
"Yellow fever! where have you nursed that?"