I think I shall not try to live by cooking, if other trades fail; I don’t mind boiling and frying, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant, but I do object to lifting saucepans and blistering my hands over heavy kettles.  There is a certain charm in making a stew, especially to the unaccustomed cook, because of the excitement of wondering what the result of such various ingredients will be, and whether any flavor save that of onions will survive the competition in the mixture.  On the whole my services as cook were voted very successful; I did my cooking better than I did my sweeping:  the latter was a failure from sheer want of muscular strength.

This curious episode came to an end abruptly.  One of my little pupils fell ill with diptheria, and I was transformed from cook into sick-nurse.  I sent my Mabel off promptly to her dear grandmother’s care, and gave myself up to my old delight in nursing.  But it is a horrible disease, diptheria, and the suffering of the patient is frightful to witness.  I shall never forget the poor little girl’s black parched lips and gasping breath.

Scarcely was she convalescent, when the youngest boy, a fine, strong, healthy little fellow, sickened with scarlet fever.  We elders held a consultation, and decided to isolate the top floor from the rest of the house, and to nurse the little lad there; it seemed almost hopeless to prevent such a disease from spreading through a family of children, but our vigorous measures were successful, and none other suffered.  I was voted to the post of nurse, and installed myself promptly, taking up the carpets, turning out the curtains, and across the door ways hanging sheets which I kept always wet with chloride of lime.  My meals were brought upstairs and put on the landing outside; my patient and I remained completely isolated, until the disease had run its course; and when all risk was over, I proudly handed over my charge, the disease touching no other member of the flock.

It was a strange time, those weeks of the autumn and early winter in Mr. Woodward’s house.  He was a remarkably good man, very religious and to a very remarkable extent not “of this world”.  A “priest” to the tips of his finger-nails, and looking on his priestly office as the highest a man could fill, he yet held it always as one which put him at the service of the poorest who needed help.  He was very good to me, and, while deeply lamenting my “perversion”, held, by some strange unpriestlike charity, that my “unbelief” was but a passing cloud, sent as trial by “the Lord”, and soon to vanish again, leaving me in the “sunshine of faith”.  He marvelled much, I learned afterwards, where I gained my readiness to work heartily for others, and to remain serenely content amid the roughnesses of my toiling life.  To my great amusement I heard later that his elder daughters, trained in strictest observance of all Church ceremonies, had much discussed my non-attendance at the Sacrament, and had finally arrived at the conclusion that I had committed some deadly sin, for which the humble work which I undertook at their house was the appointed penance, and that I was excluded from “the Blessed Sacrament” until the penance was completed!