“Why, of course not,” said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of the compliment, “I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity, Harriet.”

“Anna,” said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, “if it had not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago.  Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women, marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well.  It was because she tried to marry me off:  that was the bottom of the deviltry—­the men saw through her.”

“I am afraid they did,” admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down into a hole.

“Of course I know I am not brilliant,” conceded Harriet, “but then I am never commonplace.”

“I should like to catch any one saying such a thing.”

“Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives:  do they not?”

“Oh, don’t ask that question in this porch,” exclaimed Miss Anna a little resentfully.  “What do I know about it!”

“My mother thinks I am a weak woman,” continued Harriet, musingly.  “If my day ever comes, she will know that I am, strong, Anna, strong.”

“Ah, now, you must forgive your mother,” cried Miss Anna, having reached a familiar turn in this familiar dialogue.  “Whatever she did, she did for the best.  Certainly it was no fault of yours.  But you could get married to-morrow if you wished and you know it, Harriet.” (Miss Anna offered up the usual little prayer to be forgiven.)

The balm of those words worked through Harriet’s veins like a poison of joy.  So long as a single human being expresses faith in us, what matters an unbelieving world?  Harriet regularly visited Miss Anna to hear these maddening syllables.  She called for them as for the refilling of a prescription, which she preferred to get fresh every time rather than take home once for all and use as directed.

Among a primitive folk who seemed to have more moral troubles than any other and to feel greater need of dismissing them by artificial means, there grew up the custom of using a curious expedient.  They chose a beast of the field and upon its head symbolically piled all the moral hard-headedness of the several tribes; after which the unoffending brute was banished to the wilderness and the guilty multitude felt relieved.  However crude that ancient method of transferring mental and moral burdens, it had at least this redeeming feature:  the early Hebrews heaped their sins upon a creature which they did not care for and sent it away.  In modern times we pile our burdens upon our dearest fellow-creatures and keep them permanently near us for further use.  What human being but has some other upon whom he nightly hangs his troubles as he hangs his different garments upon hooks and nails in the walls around him?  Have we ever suspected that when once the habit of transferring our troubles has become pleasant to us, we thereafter hunt for troubles in order that we may have them to transfer, that we magnify the little ones in order to win the credit of having large ones, and that we are wonderfully refreshed by making other people despondent about us?  Mercifully those upon whom the burdens are hung often become the better for their loads; they may not live so long, but they are more useful.  Thus in turn the weak develop the strong.