Reaching home, Mary could scarcely wait an opportunity to tell Aunt Sarah all her plans for Sadie’s betterment.  When she finally did tell her Aunt, she smiled and said:  “Mary, I’m not surprised.  You are always planning to do a kind act for some one.  You remind me of the lines, ‘If I Can Live,’ by Helen Hunt Jackson.”  And she repeated the following for Mary: 

If I can live.

    If I can live
    To make some pale face brighter and to give
    A second luster to some tear-dimmed eye,
      Or e’en impart
      One throb of comfort to an aching heart,
    Or cheer some wayworn soul in passing by;

    If I can lend
    A strong hand to the fallen, or defend
    The right against a single envious strain,
      My life, though bare,
      Perhaps, of much that seemeth dear and fair
    To us of earth, will not have been in vain.

    The purest joy,
    Most near to heaven, far from earth’s alloy,
    Is bidding cloud give way to sun and shine;
      And ’twill be well
      If on that day of days the angels tell
    Of me, she did her best for one of Thine.

CHAPTER XVI.

Old parlor made beautiful (modernized).

When John Landis came into possession of “Clear Spring” Farm, where his mother had lived during her lifetime, she having inherited it from her father, the rooms of the old farm house were filled with quaint, old-fashioned furniture of every description.  “Aunt Sarah,” on coming to the farm to live, had given a personal touch and cheery, homelike look to every room in the house, with one exception, the large, gloomy, old-fashioned parlor, which was cold, cheerless and damp.  She confessed to Mary she always felt as if John’s dead-and-gone ancestors’ ghostly presences inhabited the silent room.  The windows were seldom opened to allow a ray of sunlight to penetrate the dusk with which the room was always enveloped, except when the regular weekly sweeping day arrived; when, after being carefully swept and dusted, it was promptly closed.  A room every one avoided, Aunt Sarah was very particular about always having fresh air and sunlight in every other part of the house but his one room.  The old fireplace had been boarded up many years before Aunt Sarah’s advent to the farm, so it could not be used.  One day Mary noticed, while dusting the room (after it had been given a thorough sweeping by Sibylla, Aunt Sarah’s one maid servant), that the small, many-paned windows facing the East, at one end of the parlor, when opened, let in a flood of sunshine; and in the evening those at the opposite end of the long room gave one a lovely view of the setting sun—­a finer picture than any painted by the hand of a master.  Mary easily persuaded her Aunt to make some changes in the unlivable room.  She suggested that they consult her Uncle about repapering and painting the room and surprise him with the result when finished.