However grievous and crushing we may consider the trials and troubles of life to be, while they last, they are never altogether unbearable.
The load laid upon us is seldom weighted beyond the capacity of our endurance; and then, when in course of time our ills become alleviated, and the burden we have so long borne slides off our backs, the relief we feel is proportionately all the greater, our sense of light-heartedness and mental freedom, the more intense and complete.
Existence, to follow out the argument, is not always painted in shadow, its horizon obscured by dark-tinted nebulosities! On the contrary, there is ever some light infused into it, to bring out the deeper tones—“a silver lining” generally “to every cloud,” as the proverb has it. So, I now experienced, as I am going to tell you.
The second year of my residence in America opened much more brightly than the miserable twelvemonth I had just passed through might have led me to hope—if I could have hoped on any longer, that is!
Early in the spring, when the warming breath of the power-increasing sun was slowly unloosing the chains of winter—when the rapid-running Hudson was sweeping down huge blocks and fields of ice from Albany, flooding New York Bay with a collection of little bergs, so that it looked somewhat like the Arctic effect I had seen on the Thames on that happy Christmas of the past, only on ever so much larger a scale—I received letters from England that cheered me up wonderfully, changing the whole aspect of my life.
“Good news from home, good news for me, had come across the deep blue sea”—in the words of Gilmore’s touching ballad; and “though I wandered far away, my heart was full of joy to-day; for, friends across the ocean’s foam had sent to me good news from home”—to further paraphrase it.
Good news?—“glorious news,” rather, I should say!
Yes, I had not only a glad, welcome letter from Miss Pimpernell, in which the dear little old lady made me laugh and cry again; but, I also heard from the good vicar, who was one of the worst correspondents in the world, never putting pen to paper, save in the compilation of his weekly sermons, except under the most dire necessity, or kindly compulsion.
To receive an epistle from him was an event!
And, what do you think he wrote to me about? What, can you imagine, made dear little Miss Pimpernell’s lengthy missive—scribed as it was in the most puzzling of calligraphies—of so engrossing an interest, that I read it again and again; valuing it more than all her previous budgets of parish gossip put together, entertaining as I thought them before?