A Pair of Clogs - Amy Walton

She leant back in her chair. The interview was ended. Iris’s visit to Paradise Court was over.

But not the memory of it, that dwelt freshly in her mind for years; and when Susie and Dottie demanded again and again to be told how the duck sat under the bee-hive, or how Iris had driven from Dinham in the donkey-cart, the whole place came before her like a brightly painted picture. And in the picture were two things which it pleased her most to look at and remember—Miss Munnion’s face when she had kissed her at the gate, and Moore’s when he thanked her for fetching the “stuff for the little un,”—these always stood out clearly, even when the background of Paradise Court became dim and indistinct. Neither were her godmother’s parting words and her proverb forgotten. Sometimes in after years, when Iris came to know what poverty really means, and when difficulties and troubles rose in Albert Street which a little more money would have relieved, she thought of them mournfully. Poverty had indeed come in at the door, and it might have been in her power to keep it out. She could not do that now, she had missed her “chance,” as Mrs Fotheringham had said; but there still remained one other thing—Love should not fly out of the window. And he never did. Many hands, some of them small and weak, held him fast in 29 Albert Street, and he was always to be found there, though he might hide himself for a time.

“After all,” said Iris to herself, “there are flowers here as well as in Paradise Court!”

And so there were. There is a crop that flourishes sometimes better in the hard soil of poverty and labour than where beauty, culture, art, and all that wealth can produce spread their soft influences. These are the flowers called patience, unselfishness, simplicity, love. They grow best, not where life is most pleasant to the senses, but where cold winds often blow roughly and outward things are ugly and poor.

“Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing more courageous, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller nor better in heaven and earth.”—Thomas à Kempis.

The End.