A Circuit Rider's Wife

by Corra Harris

I did not wait to speak to the people after the sermon, the way a preacher's wife must do to show her friendliness and interest. I hurried out and around behind the church to where he lay folded deep beneath the pine shadows. And there I had it out with him, as sometimes we had it out together in other days, I doing all the talking, and he no less silent than usual there in his holy grave. We had never quarreled as man and wife, because he would not do his part of the contending. I untied my bonnet strings, took it off and laid it on the grass, sat down by his headstone and cried—not so much for him as for fear he would not understand. He never had.

Not So Much for Him as for Fear He Would Not Understand.

William's greatest limitation as a minister was his firm conviction that the world was a drawback to Heaven. He fought it and abused it to the last, as if God had not made it and designed it to furnish properly-chastened material for His higher Kingdom. And somehow, as I wept and talked down to him in his dust I felt wonderfully like the young woman that had loved him and feared him during those first rebellious years when I was still so much the Episcopalian and so little the Methodist.

The next day I sent a letter to my sister Sarah, a widow living with her two grown daughters in New York. For years I had kept up no relations with my own family. They were of the world, prosperous, and I felt that they could not understand William nor the soul-steepling way we lived. But now I was writing to accept the invitation Sarah sent me just after William's death, to make my home with her.

A week later I packed my things, borrowed my church letter, locked my door and took the train at Royden for New York. I told the neighbors I was going for a visit to New York, but really I was on my way to find the world again. And I found it. You cannot find anything else in New York.

Sarah and the girls met me at the Grand Central Station and they spent more kisses welcoming me than I had received since my bridal days. Sarah is two years older than I am, but she looks ten years younger, and there is not the mark of a prayer on her smooth face, while I feel as if I might have the doxology stamped in wrinkles above my eyebrows.

Everything is different from the way it is at home. We do not have dinner till supper-time, and there is no mantel or fireplace in my room, although the furniture is grander than anything I ever saw. I set William's photograph on the dresser, and I can tell by the way he looks at me all day long that he would not approve of the way I am carrying on. But I cannot help it; I must have a little spell of world life. That other in which I qualified with him for Heaven was too stretching to something in me that grew mortally tired of stretching. I have set myself with all diligence to enjoy the things of this world in the time that's left me. The more I think of it the more nearly certain I am that they were meant for us.

One thing alone troubles me—that is, the thought of William going up and down these thirty years just preaching and praying and bearing other people's burdens and never once having the right to step aside and rest his soul from being just good; never once having a natural human vacation in the natural human world; always praying and preaching and fasting that he might pray and preach better, always scrimping that he might be able to pay more to the cause of missions, always a little threadbare, and often a little breathless spiritually, but always persistently stalking Peter and Paul and the angels through the Scriptures up the high and higher altitudes of his own beautiful imagination. No matter how rested he is now in Heaven, no matter how much he may be enjoying himself, my heart aches for him because of the innocent happiness he missed here.