It would take more note-books than my trunk could hold to tell the story of the kindness shown me here; of the patience, skill, and resourcefulness which have fought for me when I could no longer fight for myself. And it is good to be in a place like this for awhile, to learn what human nature is capable of under racking, tearing strain. The courage one finds, the high-hearted endurance of plain, ordinary people, the brave good cheer of men and women whose pain-lined faces choke one’s throat with tears! I have seen these things so often these last eighteen months—or at least in so much of them as I could be carried, lying flat in a wheeled-chair, out on one of the balconies, where I could catch glimpses of the struggles that were going on around me. It is not all loss, this suffering. Sickness does bring out hidden ugliness and weakness, for it searches soul and body to the inmost core. But there is more good hidden than there is evil; and in the stress of suffering the most ordinary people blossom into a loveliness of soul which reveals them as of the company of the saints. Life is so narrow and commonplace to the average experience that it can only make a narrow and commonplace appeal. “The trivial round, the common task” has, for so many, no large connections; and the depths of their natures are never stirred until their every-day world lies in ruins about them, and to live at all they must discover new resources in “—_that true world within the world we see_,” and gain a true perspective and a new horizon. And the funny folk in a place like this—they would fill volumes, too! Of course they are pitiful; but I never could see the harm of laughter over pitifulness, if only one doesn’t laugh unkindly. For some of them never find new resources. Disaster leads them, not to discovery, but to an _impasse_; and they revenge themselves on the inexplicable by endless incongruities of thought and action. The patient who really helped me most was a dear old lady who, though forbidden, like the rest, to talk to me, felt it her heaven-sent mission to cheer me up. Whenever she saw me deposited on the porch she flew out, wringing her hands in sympathy, and exclaiming, “Oh, _what_ is life without health!” It really is a good deal when you come to think of it; and the old lady’s reiterations elicited a string of mental replies as long as from western New York to Bird Corners, and kept me in ammunition for Grumpy.