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There are times when to the unintelligent observer the affairs of this world appear a hopeless tangle, a web without a pattern, a heap of unclassified material without an architect, a wild, unmeaning chaos of things animate and inanimate, all grinding, groaning, clashing together, sport of the gods or of demons, tending towards nothing, useless, hideous. But to one who views the world from another and higher level there sometimes appear illumining hints of harmony and completeness, tokens of a Master Mind working continually among the affairs of men and universes, setting all in divine order, either with or without the understanding and co-operation of the lesser intelligences.
Thus when Barbara Preston was impelled, she knew not how, to send forth her strange and piteous little appeal to the unknown, it found instant response, and proceeded to fit itself into the scheme of things as perfectly and as cunningly as a tiny bit in a picture puzzle. The paper in which it appeared passed into the hands of a great number of persons, who glanced carelessly at its glaring headlines or searched painstakingly through its losts and founds or things offered, or help wanted, according to their varied tastes or necessities. On the second day thereafter, as was also to be expected, the particular edition containing the queer little unclassified appeal, found its way to many ash-cans, waste-paper baskets, bureau drawers, and pantry shelves; in its progress it helped to build numberless fires, it wrapped parcels of every conceivable shape and size; it fluttered out of car windows, across decks of steamers and ferry-boats; it floated and dissolved in many waterways, and finally disappeared, swallowed in the abyss which appears always to yawn for all things of human creation. Having vanished mysteriously, unobtrusively, as must every printed page sooner or later, it nevertheless left its mark on the lives of many. Plans were changed, voyages undertaken or abandoned, marriages made and unmade. In a word, prosperity, ruin, joy, sadness, glory, despair—all came about through its appearance, and persisted in ever widening circles after it had passed from sight and mind.
Four men and ten women, to be exact, of those who chanced to notice Barbara’s somewhat absurd little advertisement, cut it out of the doomed sheet, and placed it in securer quarters, for further consideration. Of the women four wrote to Barbara asking for references; of the men, one conceived it to be “a business opportunity,” not to be written of here; one was a widower blessed with three small unruly children and little appetite for further matrimonial experience; another a rich, crabbed old miser, bent on escaping designing relatives, and the fourth an enterprising young mining engineer, very deeply in love with a pretty girl and anxious to marry her and take her with him to a region remote from civilization. The girl had sighed, demurred, wept—she was of the delicate, clinging vine variety, and totally unfit for the hard experiences of a mining camp. But to this fact the amorous engineer was quite naturally oblivious. He dilated glowingly upon the wonderful efficiency of Chinese servants, who could, he assured her, beat creation in the expert disguising of the inevitable “canned goods,” which formed the staple of provision. Her questions and those of her mother elicited the fact that there were no women to be hired in any capacity, the wives of the miners, for the most part, being of a free and independent nature, and, moreover, entirely occupied with their own affairs.
Mamma looked at Ethel, and Ethel looked at Mamma; Mamma’s glance being dubious and Ethel’s timidly imploring.
“I couldn’t think of allowing darling Ethel to go away out there to that dreary, lonely place, with no one to wait on her and take care of her except a Chinese man,” Mamma said tearfully. She added that Ethel was delicate, very delicate.
“The mountain air will make her strong,” declared the engineer enthusiastically. Then he gazed lovingly at the slight, pale, fashionably gowned young woman who somehow managed to hold the wealth of his honest affections in her small, highly manicured hands, and in whom he fancied all possible happiness was embodied “forever” (as he would have put it).
The end of it all was Mamma’s ultimatum, strongly backed up by Ethel’s dutiful acquiescence, to the effect that a suitable maid must be secured; a person who would combine in one the capabilities of cook, ladies’ maid, seamstress, and nurse, and who would accompany the timid bride on her long journey away from Mamma’s side.