This is what had happened at one point, but the germ was not a single one, and at another in the same state, another mind had felt the same touch, and the same result had come. The project had been talked over before it took positive form, and talked over with a woman, who, from the upper chamber where long years had held her prisoner to pain, looked out upon the world through others’ eyes, but with an insight that went to the heart of all possibilities for help. The young minister who counted her word as equivalent to the united force of a dozen elders, went home to his flock among the Pennsylvania mountains—hard-working farmers from whom quick response could hardly have been expected—and this is the letter he wrote on a Sunday when he had spoken to them his first word of the wish born a year before:
“Sherman, Pa., June 3, 1877.
“My Dear Mrs. L.:—The ball is set in motion. I took for my text this morning, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me,” and made the practical bearing of my words the bringing out into our homes some of the waifs and outcasts from the city. One man stopped on his way home to say that he would take four. In another house there is a call for a mother and a baby, and so on through the town. The enthusiasm and response of my people have delighted me.
“Next to get the money; then to tell the children. Must not two weeks in this pure mountain air be felt by them in after life? It seems to me that they are all but here.
“Now may I have the introduction you promised me to Dr. Eggleston? I shall try for a pass over the road to go back and forth with the children myself, and perhaps I can arrange with some of these good people on the way to bring us a country lunch as the train comes along. Some good angel whisper it in the ear of a little one! Tell a tired mother there is life for her child in this fresh country air.
“Willard Parsons.”
It was an unknown name then, but through Dr. Eggleston, then on the point of sailing for Europe, interest was roused. The Erie Railway officers proved that corporations have sometimes a soul, and full fares were reduced to half fares, and half fares to quarter fares, and a pass was given to Mr. Parsons, and on July 19th went out the first group of nine. They were mere wraiths of children, crippled, in consumption, enfeebled from whooping cough; each one stamped with disease and pinched and thin for want of food. It was doubtful how they could bear the journey.
The children who swarmed out next day “to catch raspberries” proved perfectly manageable, and when their two weeks ended, returned home transformed from sad-eyed, prematurely old little figures, into live children, loaded with gifts and crying to stay longer. The story has become a familiar one, but it can never become tedious. The second group gave less anxiety. The work was better understood. Seventeen boys and girls, each wearing a blue ribbon bow as the badge of “country week” children, gathered from all quarters, and all, delicate, half-starved, suffering with hip-disease, asthma, and a dozen ailments, met at the Erie train.
The diary of the summer’s work runs over with small absurdities, with pathos, with promise. Sixty in all shared the good provided for them at a total cost of only one hundred and eighty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents. But for New York as for Philadelphia, it was easier to get the money than to get the children. Often a pale and care-worn child was the breadwinner. “Sometimes the mother had a fear of separation, or the feeble, childish hands must tend baby and do the housework while mother goes out by the day. ‘It is harder for Jack than for any one else when the baby comes,’ one mother said. ‘The care comes on him.’ Baby was in her arms as she spoke, but Jack was close by, thirteen years old, under size, and washing stockings at the tub!”
In many cases the children made friends for life, in a few the attachment formed being so strong that adoption followed. For all of them was the same experience; a fortnight or more of bliss and revelation and a return, loaded down with bundles and boxes and bags of the things that each one chose to gather.