Patient, cheerful, and kindly: Now, is it being patient, cheerful, and kindly to be so only with those who are so to us? For, as St. Peter tells us, even ungodly people do that. But if we can do good to some one who has done us ill, oh, what a privilege that is! And even God will thank us for it, the Apostle says. Let us be kindest to the impatient and unkindly.
Now let me tell you of two Nurses whom we knew.
One was a lady, with just enough to live upon, who took an old widow to nurse into her house: recommended to her by her minister. One day she met him and reproached him. Why? Because the old widow was “too good”; “anybody could nurse her.” Presently a grumbling old woman, never contented with anything anybody did, who thought she was never treated well enough, and that she never had “her due,” was found. And this old woman the lady took into her house and nursed till she died; because, she said, nobody else liked to do anything for her, and she did. That was something like kindness, for there is no great kindness in doing good to any one who is grateful and thanks us for it.
But my other story is something much better still.
A poor Nurse, who had been left a widow, with nothing to live upon but her own earnings, inquired for some tedious children to take care of. As you may suppose, there was no difficulty in finding this article. And from that day, for twenty years, she never had less than two, three, or four orphans with her, and sometimes five, whom she brought up as her own, training them for service. She taught them domestic work, for she herself went out to service at nine years old. She never had any difficulty in finding places for them, and for twenty years she had thus a succession of children. But she taught them something better.
She taught them that they had “nothing but their character to depend upon.” “I tell them,” she said, “it was all I had myself; God helps girls that watch over themselves. If a girl isn’t made to feel this early, it’s hard afterwards to make her feel it.”
These girls, so brought up, turned out much better than those brought up in most large Union schools, for asylums are not like homes. Of the children whom Nurse took in, one was a girl of such bad habits and such a mischief-maker that no one else could manage her. But Nurse did. She soon found she could not refuse boys. One was a boy of fourteen, just out of prison for bad ways, whom she took and reclaimed, and who became as good a boy as can be. These are only two specimens.
They called her “Mother.” And God, she used to say, gave them to her as her own. You will ask how she supported them. The larger number of them she supported by taking in washing, by charing one day a week, and bye and bye, by taking in journeymen as lodgers. Now and then a lady would pay for an orphan. Once she took in a sailor’s five motherless children for 5s. a week from the father: but she has taken in apprentices as lodgers, whose own fathers could not afford to keep them for their wages.
All this time she washed for a poor sick Irishwoman, who never gave her any thanks but that “the clothes were not well washed, nor was anything done as it ought to be done.” Yet she took in this woman’s child of two years old as her own, till the father came back, when he gave up drink and claimed it.
Every Friday she gave her earnings to some poor women, who bought goods with the money, which they sold again in the market on Saturday, and returned her money to her on Saturday night. She said she never lost a penny by this: and it kept several old women going.