Sometimes when we were all together for a season, visiting, or during the winters we spent in Florida and lived together, it fell to her part and mine to do the dinner dishes together every night, and we raced, she washing, I wiping and putting away; making a record each night and trying to beat it the next. And such good, good times as we had together, my beloved aunt and I, as we worked with a will and left the kitchen immaculate for the next morning. Oh, she was a wonderful housekeeper!
Yes, and a marvelous pastor's wife! She took the whole parish into her life and gave herself to the work. She was not a modern minister's wife, who only goes to teas and receptions, and plays bridge and attends to the social end of life, never bothering about the church. She was the real old-fashioned kind, who made calls on all the parishioners with her husband, knew every member intimately, cared for the sick, gathered the young people into her home making both a social and religious center for them with herself as leader and adviser; grew intimate with each one personally and led them to Christ; became their confidante; and loved them all as if they had been her brothers and sisters. She taught the Primary class—and incidentally the mothers of the Primary class. She quietly and unobtrusively managed the Missionary Society and the Ladies' Aid, not always as its executive officer, often keeping quite in the background. She became the dear friend of every woman in the church without making any of them jealous. She was beloved, almost adored of them all.
She was a tender, vigilant, wonderful mother, such a mother as few are privileged to have, giving without stint of her time and her strength and her love and her companionship.
Even while she was quite young, when I was a small child she began to go out into the world, to speak in public, to read her stories, to lead Primary Sunday School Conferences, and, as I grew older and developed a delight in drawing, she sometimes took me along to do her blackboard work for her, at which privilege I swelled with pride. She was much in demand in those days, and I remember the awe with which I regarded her as one of the great ones of the earth, who was paid large sums to tell other people the best ways of teaching, and to read her fascinating stories. How I loved her and hung upon her every word and smile. How proud I was to belong to her! And am still.
All these things she did, and yet wrote books! Stories out of real life, that struck home and showed us to ourselves as God saw us; that sent us to our knees to talk with Him.
With marvelous skill she searched hearts, especially of the easy-going Christian, whether minister or layman, young and old, and brought them awake and alive to their inconsistencies. She wove her stories around their common, everyday life, till all her characters became alive and real to those who read. They still live within our memories like people we have known intimately and dwelt among. Ester Reid and Julia Reid, the Four Girls at Chautauqua, Mrs. Solomon Smith. I almost expect to meet some of them in Heaven.
Perhaps she wrote more and better because she was doing so eagerly in every direction. Her public, her church, her family, her home.
I wish I might paint you a picture of that home as I knew it; of my home, its counterpart; of the years the two families spent much time together as one family. The days were one long dream. Hard work? Yes, but good fellowship. Everybody working together with a common aim, and joy in the work and the fellowship!
And the evenings! Oh, those evenings, the crown of the days, the time to which we all looked forward as to a goal when our work was done! Those evenings are bright spots in my youth. Especially the evenings of the years we all spent together in Florida, when the sun went down sharply and the light went velvet black at evening, until the great tropical moon came out. Those long evenings when the soft dense darkness shut us in to a cheerful supper table, and, after we had hustled through the dishes, we all gathered in the big sitting-room around the open fire for family worship. Yes, we were as old-fashioned as that! We had family worship both morning and evening. And I am not of those modern ones who tell such things to scoff at them and say how sick they got of religion because of it, and lay to that their present indifference to God and the Bible. I look back to those times as the most precious, the most beautiful, the most powerful influence that came into my life. I thank God for a family that worshipped Him morning and evening and gave me an early knowledge and love for the Bible and the things of the Kingdom. Either my uncle or my father would conduct the little service, and often the one or the other of them would say to my dear aunt: "You read the chapter to-night, Belle," just because she was such a beautiful reader and we all loved to listen to her. At other times, we would recite verses, all around, a verse apiece, and then kneel in a circle for the prayer.
Oh, those prayers of the years that made my life inevitably acquainted with God, and the Lord Jesus, so that I never could be troubled by the doubts of to-day, because I know Him, "whom to know is life eternal." I cannot be thankful enough for those prayers, and that sacred time of worship every day that brought me into His very Presence.