THE HEAVY YOKE

The burden of ministering rested very lightly on Carol’s slender shoulders.  The endless procession of missionary meetings, aid societies, guilds and boards, afforded her a childish delight and did not sap her enthusiasm to the slightest degree.  She went out of her little manse each new day, laughing, and returned, wearily perhaps, but still laughing.  She sang light-heartedly with the youth of the church, because she was young and happy with them.  She sympathized passionately with the old and sorry ones, because the richness of her own content, and the blessed perfection of her own life, made her heart tender.

Into her new life she had carried three matchless assets for a minister’s wife,—­a supreme confidence in the exaltation of the ministry, a boundless adoration for her husband, and a natural liking for people that made people naturally like her.  Thus equipped, she faced the years of aids and missions with profound serenity.

She was sorry they hadn’t more time for the honeymoon business, she and David.  Honeymooning was such tremendously good fun.  But they were so almost unbelievably busy all the time.  On Monday David was down-town all day, attending minister’s meeting and Presbytery in the morning, and looking up new books in the afternoon.  Carol always joined him for lunch and they counted that noon-time hour a little oasis in a week of work.  In the evening there were deacons’ meetings, or trustees’ meetings, or the men’s Bible class.  On Tuesday evening they had a Bible study class.  On Wednesday evening was prayer-meeting.  Thursday night, they, with several of their devoted workers, walked a mile and a half across country to Happy Hollow where they conducted mad little mission meetings.  Friday night Carol met with the young women’s club, and on Saturday night was a mission study class.

Carol used to sigh over the impossibility of having a beau night.  She said that she had often heard that husbands couldn’t be sweethearts, but she had never believed it before.  Pinned down to facts, however, she admitted she preferred the husband.

Mornings Carol was busy with housework, talking to herself without intermission as she worked.  And David spent long hours in his study, poring over enormous books that Carol insisted made her head ache from the outside and would probably give her infantile paralysis if she dared to peep between the covers.  Afternoons were the aid societies, missionary societies, and all the rest of them, and then the endless calls,—­calls on the sick, calls on the healthy, calls on the pillars, calls on the backsliders, calls on the very sad, calls on the very happy,—­every varying phase of life in a church community merits a call from the minister and his wife.