After the Storm

Since her return to her father's house, the whole life of Irene had

been marked by great circumspection. The trial through which she had

passed was enough to sober her mind and turn her thoughts in some

new directions; and this result had followed. Pride, self-will and

impatience of control found no longer any spur to reactive life, and

so her interest in woman's rights, social reforms and all their

concomitants died away, for lack of a personal bearing. At first

there had been warm arguments with Miss Carman on these subjects,

but these grew gradually less earnest, and were finally avoided by

both, as not only unprofitable, but distasteful. Gradually this wise

and true friend had quickened in the mind of Irene an interest in

things out of herself. There are in every neighborhood objects to

awaken our sympathies, if we will only look at and think of them.

"The poor ye have always with you." Not the physically poor only,

but, in larger numbers, the mentally and spiritually poor. The hands

of no one need lie idle a moment for lack of work, for it is no

vague form of speech to say that the harvest is great and the

laborers few.

There were ripe harvest-fields around Ivy Cliff, though Irene had

not observed the golden grain bending its head for the sickle until

Rose led her feet in the right direction. Not many of the naturally

poor were around them, yet some required even bodily

ministrations--children, the sick and the aged. The destitution that

most prevailed was of the mind; and this is the saddest form of

poverty. Mental hunger! how it exhausts the soul and debases its

heaven-born faculties, sinking it into a gross corporeal sphere,

that is only a little removed from the animal! To feed the hungry

and clothe the naked mean a great deal more than the bestowal of

food and raiment; yes, a great deal more; and we have done but a

small part of Christian duty--have obeyed only in the letter--when

we supply merely the bread that perishes.

Rose Carman had been wisely instructed, and she was an apt scholar.

Now, from a learner she became a teacher, and in the suffering Irene

found one ready to accept the higher truths that governed her life,

and to act with her in giving them a real ultimation. So, in the two

years which had woven their web of new experiences for the heart of

Irene, she had been drawn almost imperceptibly by Rose into fields

of labor where the work that left her hands was, she saw, good work,

and must endure for ever. What peace it often brought to her

striving spirit, when, but for the sustaining and protecting power

of good deeds, she would have been swept out upon the waves of

turbulent passion--tossed and beaten there until her exhausted heart

sunk down amid the waters, and lay dead for a while at the bottom of

her great sea of trouble!