Once in my life have I conceived what might have been, if I had had
the skill to paint it, an immortal picture. It was thus. I was
attending a Christmas morning service in a big parish church. I was
in a pew facing east; close to me, in a transept, in a pew facing
sideways, there sat a little old woman, who had hurried in just
before the service began. She was a widow, living, I afterwards
learnt, in an almshouse hard by. She was old and feeble, very poor,
and her life had been a series of calamities, relieved upon a
background of the hardest and humblest drudgery. She had lost her
husband years ago by a painful and terrible illness. She had lost
her children one by one; she was alone in the world, save for a few
distant and indifferent relatives. To get into the almshouse had
been for her a stroke of incredible and inconceivable good fortune.
She had a single room, with a tiny kitchen off it. She had very
little to say for herself; she could hardly read. No one took any
particular interest in her; but she was a kindly, gallant,
unselfish old soul, always ready to bear a hand, full of gratitude
for the kindnesses she had received--and God alone knows how few
they had been.
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