All this was some years ago. By a curious chance,—which has the air of being something more considerable,—it was while I was writing these very paragraphs about Margaret that I had a letter from her, the first since she rode away. It was very characteristic, written in a scrawly and benevolent hand:—
"Will you please let me hear, ma'am, whether you're dead or alive. I've had you on my mind, and for six weeks I can't sleep night or day for thinking of you.
"Your old servant,
"Margaret."
Let no one tell me that this is mere coincidence. New proof it is, to one who has long dealt with the poor, of strange powers of which they are possessed. Here is a sister, I tell you,—"plainer nor your eyes,"—to the old blind man, who used to come tap-tap, tap-tapping up the shadowy stairs and into the nursery for the penny I had withheld.
Margaret had come back also. Useless to suppose that I could hide from her in the silence and shadows of the intervening years. She had with her shrewd eye found me out. She had come, like the blind man, not to exact money of me, no; but like a witch disembodied, and through the mail, she had come to levy a more precious tax—to collect as of old the old sympathetic affection; the old toll I had paid her so often before; the tribute she had demanded and received times without number—not for labors rendered, no, nor for accountable values received, but rather by a kind of royal prerogative. Indeed, I take it to be a thing proved, to which this is but slight additional testimony, that these are, how much more than kings,—and it would seem by the grace of God,—sovereigns and rulers over us.
But there is still further testimony, of another order, which I feel called on to bear.
VII
MARGHARETTA
When we first went to live in the country, in the old house of which I have written, we had a sufficiently large task merely to make the house itself livable. But as time went on, we attempted to do a very little farming.
How greatly did this broaden and extend my experience as to the poor! There were the boys from ten to sixteen who came (again, these were those whose condition needed improving) to do work on the farm for the summers: Joseph, the Hebrew, who from his long and elaborate prayers should have been at least a priest of the Temple; Lester, so practised in picking locks and purloining that it was sheer waste of genius to place him in a home like ours, where jewelry and other returns for his skill were so slender. He did the best he could with the circumstances, but how meagre they were, after all!
There was the little girl, too, who could dance and recite and sing ragtime, having done so in vaudeville. Our home offered her neither audience nor stage, nor was there a footlight in the house. And there was the young Apollo, who at the least could have shepherded the sheep of Admetus; we had no sheep—only one cow.