Each silver hair, each wrinkle there
    Records some good deed done,
  Some flower she scattered by the way
    Some spark from love’s bright sun.

Mrs. Larkins had grown kinder and more considerate as the years passed by.  Mr. Thomas had been happily married for several years.  Annette was still in her Southern home doing what she could to teach, help and befriend those on whose chains the rust of ages had gathered.  Mr. Luzerne found out Annette’s location and started Southward with a fresh hope springing up in his heart.

It was a balmy day in the early spring when he reached the city where Annette was teaching.  Her home was a beautiful place of fragrance and flowers.  Groups of young people were gathered around their teacher listening eagerly to a beautiful story she was telling them.  Elderly women were scattered in little companies listening to or relating some story of Annette’s kindness to them and their children.

“I told her,” said one, “that I had a vision that some one who was fair, was coming to help us.  She smiled and said she was not fair.  I told her she was fair to me.”

“I wish she had been here fifteen years ago,” said another one.  “Before she came my boy was just as wild as a colt, but now he is jist as stiddy as a judge.”

“I just think,” said another one, “that she has been the making of my Lucy.  She’s just wrapped up in Miss Annette, thinks the sun rises and sets in her.”  Old mothers whose wants had been relieved, came with the children and younger men too, to celebrate Annette’s 31st birthday.  Happy and smiling, like one who had passed through suffering into peace she stood, the beloved friend of old and young, when suddenly she heard a footstep on the veranda which sent the blood bounding in swift currents back to her heart and left her cheek very pale.  It was years since she had heard the welcome rebound of that step, but it seemed as familiar to her as the voice of a loved and long lost friend, or a precious household word, and before her stood, with slightly bowed form and hair tinged with gray, Luzerne.  Purified through suffering, which to him had been an evangel of good, he had come to claim the love of his spirit.  He had come not to separate her from her cherished life work, but to help her in uplifting and helping those among whom her lot was cast as a holy benediction, and so after years of trial and pain, their souls had met at last, strengthened by duty, purified by that faith which works by love, and fitted for life’s highest and holiest truths.

And now, in conclusion, permit me to say under the guise of fiction, I have essayed to weave a story which I hope will subserve a deeper purpose than the mere amusement of the hour, that it will quicken and invigorate human hearts and not fail to impart a lesson of usefulness and value.

Notes

1.  In the original, this sentence reads:  “After she became a wife and mother, instead of becoming entirely absorbed in a round of household cares and duties, and she often said, that the moment the crown of motherhood fell upon her how that she had poured a new interest in the welfare of her race.”