And then the evening that followed!
We would all get our work, sewing or drawing, painting or knitting, or embroidery. My father, and my uncle would each take his particular chair in a shaded corner, and a book would be brought out. It was always a book that had been selected with great care, usually a story, now and again a great missionary book but more often a good novel. And this aunt would usually do the reading. Sometimes my aunt and my mother took turns reading. They both were remarkable readers, and knit close in spirit since early childhood. For two, sometimes three beautiful hours we reveled in the book. Reluctantly, when the word went forth that it was time to stop, we folded up our work and went to bed—sometimes pleading for just another chapter—now and then actually staying up breathless till all hours to finish some great climax. We always went off to rest with a bright eagerness for the morrow and the evening, and the story again—or a new one if we had finished one.
So we read the works of George Macdonald—we loved the Scotch, and our readers knew how to put the burr of the dialect upon their tongues—Ian Maclaren, Barrie—much of Dickens, some of Scott, Björnson, William Dean Howells, Jean Ingelow's few matchless novels, Frank Stockton, with his charming absurdities and a host of other writers whose stories seem to have become submerged and forgotten in this day of modern literature. But I look back to those stories as my meeting time with the great of the earth. How real the Bonnie Brier Bush and all its quaint true people were! How tender and strong was the Marquis of Lossie and Sir Gibbie! How I thrilled over the "Men of the Moss Hags," "Ben Hur," "The Virginian," "Jane Eyre." I mention them at random. It is my ambition to some day possess in a special set of shelves, every one of those wonderful stories that thrilled me so when I was young. Oh, don't try to tell me I would not care for them now! I do. They were real books, books that do not change because they told of human life as it is really lived in hearts. They may need to be furnished with a few electric lights and radios and airplanes and automobiles to make them up-to-date, but otherwise you will not find them out of tune with life as it is to-day, except that they are perhaps too clean and wholesome to be natural to-day.
There were frequent times when this beloved aunt, around whom we all seemed in those days to center, was called away to deliver an address, or to conduct a conference, or to furnish an evening's entertainment in some distant place; but when she returned from one of these trips we all gathered around to hear her tell her experiences, for we were always sure of stories. She saw everything, and she knew how to tell with glowing words about the days she had been away so that she lived them over again for us. It was almost better than if we had been along because she knew how to bring out the touch of pathos or beauty or fun, and her characters were all portraits. It listened like a book.
It was on one of these occasions that she told on her return from a trip, the story of this book. I remember it as if it were but yesterday, though the whole thing happened many years ago, for modern as this story is, the main part of it happened, really happened, to her personal knowledge, over thirty-five years ago.
It was told to her by a woman who was so well-known all over our country at that time that if I were to name her you could not help but remember how active she was in Woman's Suffrage and W. C. T. U. work, besides several other notable reforms and organizations. She was a brilliant public speaker, much in demand, and a great worker for young girls. She recounted this story to my aunt as a recent personal experience, and gave her permission to use it in a story (after a suitable interval of time of course, and without the original names.)
The story was written in brief form and appeared several years after its happening in a periodical as a short serial; but it is now appearing in book form for the first time. The dear author, after an interval of several years, during which on account of ill health and a feeling that her work was done, has taken up her pen once more. But at what odds! She is now eighty-seven years old and confined to her bed, the result of a fall and a broken hip. In the intervals of pain she has been elaborating and preparing this story for book form.
And now, because the manuscript was to have been in the hands of the publisher long ago, and because pain has held her in its grip for an unusually long period of weeks lately, leaving her unfit for work for the present, she has trusted me with the task of putting it into final shape. This story seems to me peculiarly fitting as a message for this present time.
I approach the work with a kind of awe upon me that I should be working on her story!
If, long ago in my childhood, it had been told me that I should ever be counted worthy to do this, I would not have believed it. Before her I shall always feel like the little worshipful child I used to be.