The chiefest action of a man of spirit
Is, never to be out of action; we should think
The soul was never to be put into the body,
Which has so many rare and curious pieces
Of mathematical motion, to stand still.
Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds.
One of the models in activity and virtue, and one who doubtless secured thereby the prize of healthy and extreme old age, was Mrs. Lydia Gustin, a native of Lyme, Connecticut. She had five children, all of whom were at home to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth day. She died in New Hampshire, on the twentieth of July, 1847, in the hundred and second year of her age. A part of the labor performed during her hundredth year, was the knitting of twenty-four pairs of stockings.
Mrs. Elizabeth Ferguson, who resided near Philadelphia, was one of the number who assisted the American prisoners taken at the battle of Germantown. She spun linen and sent it into the city, with orders that it be made into shirts. She was noted for humanity and benevolence. Learning, one time, while visiting her friends in Philadelphia, that a reduced merchant had been imprisoned for debt, and was suffering from destitution, she sent him a bed and other articles of comfort, and, though far from wealthy, put twenty dollars in money into his hands. She refused to give him her name, but was at length identified by a description of her person.
At the battle of the Cowpens, Colonel Washington wounded Colonel Tarleton; and when the latter afterwards, in conversation with Mrs. Wiley Jones, observed to her: "You appear to think very highly of Colonel Washington; and yet I have been told that he is so ignorant a fellow that he can hardly write his own name;" she replied, "It may be the case, but no man better than yourself, Colonel, can testify that he knows how to make his mark."
PHILANTHROPY OF AMERICAN WOMEN:
MISS DIX.
To the blind, the deaf, the lame,
To the ignorant and vile, Stranger, captive, slave he came,
With a welcome and a smile. Help to all he did dispense,
Gold, instruction, raiment, food; Like the gifts of Providence,
To the evil and the good.
Montgomery.
It requires the enlightening and expanding influence of Christianity to show the full extent of fraternal obligation, and to make one feel the wants of his brother's threefold nature. We must, therefore, look for large hearts, whose antennæ stretch through the domain of man's mental and moral, as well as his physical necessities, among a Christian people: there such hearts abound, and the strongest are among the female sex. Nor is this strange: the feelings of woman are more delicate, her constitution is less hardy, than man's. Physically more frail, she feels more sensibly the need of a helper and protector; and, being the greater sufferer, she thinks more of the sufferings of others, and consequently more fully develops the sisterly and sympathetic feelings of her nature.