SHARE YOUR SUCCESSES
with the old people. The probability is, that the principles they inculcated achieved your fortune. Give them a Christian percentage of kindly consideration. Let Joseph divide with Jacob the pasture fields of Goshen and the glories of the Egyptian court.
And here I would like to sing the praises of the sisterhood who remained unmarried that they might administer to aged parents. The brutal world calls these
SELF-SACRIFICING ONES
by ungallant names, and says they are peculiar or angular; but if you had had as many annoyances as they have had, Xantippe would have been an angel compared with you. It is easier to take care of five rollicking, romping children than of one childish old man. Among the best women of Brooklyn and of yonder transpontine city are those who allowed the bloom of life to pass away while they were caring for their parents. While other maidens were sound asleep, they were soaking the old man's feet or tucking up the covers around the invalid mother. While other maidens were in the cotillon, they were dancing attendance upon rheumatism and spreading plasters for the lame back of the septuagenarian, and heating catnip tea for insomnia.
In almost every circle of our kindred there has been some
QUEEN OF SELF-SACRIFICE
to whom jeweled hand after jeweled hand was offered in marriage, but who stayed on the old place because of the sense of filial obligation until the health was gone and the attractiveness of personal presence had vanished. Brutal society may call such a one by a nickname. God calls her daughter, and Heaven calls her saint, and I call her domestic martyr. A half dozen ordinary women have not as much nobility as could be found in the smallest joint of the little finger of her left hand. Although the world has stood six thousand years, this is the first apotheosis of maidenhood, although in the long line of those who have declined marriage that they might be qualified for some especial mission are the names of Anna Ross, and Margaret Breckinridge, and Mary Shelton, and Anna Etheridge, and Georgiana Willetts, the angels of the battlefields of Fair Oaks, and Lookout Mountain, and Chancellorsville, and Cooper Shop Hospital: and though single life has been honored by the fact that the three grandest men of the Bible—John and Paul and Christ—were