"It is hard to be chained to one kind of life when all the time you are sure that you have powers and possibilities that have never had a chance to come out in the open," she heard her father say one evening. "I have always wanted to be a doctor; I can never be more than a half-hearted farmer."
"You must go to Albany now, James," said the dauntless wife. "I can manage the farm until you get through your course at the medical college; and then, when you are doing work into which you can put your whole heart, a better time must come for all of us."
"How can you possibly get along?" he asked in amazement. "How can I leave you for two years to be a farmer, and father and mother, too?"
"There is a little bank here," she said, taking down a jar from a high shelf in the cupboard and jingling its contents merrily. "I have been saving bit by bit for just this sort of thing. And Alice will help me," she added, smiling at the child who had been standing near looking from father to mother in wide-eyed wonder. "You will be the little mother while I take father's place for a time, won't you, Alice?"
"It will be cruelly hard on you all," said the father, soberly. "I cannot make it seem right."
"Think how much good you can do afterward," urged his wife. "The time will go very quickly when we are all thinking of that. It is not hard to endure for a little for the sake of 'a gude time coming'—a better time not only for us, but for many besides. For I know you will be the true sort of doctor, James."
Alice never quite knew how they did manage during those two years, but she was quite sure that work done for the sake of a good to come is all joy.
"I owe much of what I am to my milkmaid days," she said.
She was always sorry for children who do not grow up with the sights and sounds of the country. "One is very near to all the simple, real things of life on a farm," she used to say. "There is a dewy freshness about the early out-of-door experiences, and a warm wholesomeness about tasks that are a part of the common lot. A country child develops, too, a responsibility—a power to do and to contrive—that the city child, who sees everything come ready to hand from a near-by store, cannot possibly gain. However much some of my friends may deplore my own early struggle with poverty and hard work, I can heartily echo George Eliot's boast: