“Henderson may bewail, and Maurice Scanlan deride, the shortcomings of the people. But through evil and good report she is there to hear from their own lips, to see with her own eyes, the story of their sorrows. Is this nothing? Is there no lesson in the fact that she, nurtured in every luxury, braves the wildest day of winter in her mission of charity?--that the most squalid misery, the most pestilent disease never deterred her? I saw her a few days back coming home at daybreak; she had passed the night in a hovel where neither you nor I would have taken shelter in a storm. The hectic flush of fatigue and anxiety was on her cheek; her eyes, deep sunk, showed weariness; and her very voice, as she spoke to me, was tremulous and weak; and of what, think you, was her mind full? Of the noble calm, the glorious, patient endurance of those she had just quitted. 'What lessons might we not learn,' said she, 'beneath the wet thatch of poverty! There are three struck down with fever in that cabin; she who remains to nurse them is a little girl of scarcely thirteen. There is all that can render sickness wretched around them. They are in pain and in want; cold winds and rain sweep across their beds, if we could call them such. If they cherish the love of life, it must be through some instinct above all reason; and there they lie, uncomplaining. The little remnant of their strength exhausts itself in a look of thankfulness,--a faint effort to say their gratitude. Oh, if querulous hypochondriacism could but see them, what teaching it might learn! Sufferings that call forth from us not alone peevishness and impatience, but actually traits of rude and ungenerous meaning, develop in them an almost refined courtesy, and a trustfulness that supplies all that is most choice in words of gratitude.'