Pitkin's small
library was very dear to her. No nun in a convent under vows of
abstinence ever practiced more rigorous self-denial than she did in the
restraints and government of intellectual tastes and desires. Her son was
dear to her as the fulfillment and expression of her unsatisfied craving
for knowledge, the possessor of those fair fields of thought which duty
forbade her to explore.
James stood and looked in at the window, and saw her sorting and
arranging the family mending, busy over piles of stockings and shirts,
while on the table beside her lay her open Bible, and she was singing to
herself, in a low, sweet undertone, one of the favorite minor-keyed
melodies of those days:
"O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home!"
An indescribable feeling, blended of pity and reverence, swelled in his
heart as he looked at her and marked the whitening hair, the thin worn
little hands so busy with their love work, and thought of all the bearing
and forbearing, the waiting, the watching, the long-suffering that had
made up her life for so many years. The very look of exquisite calm and
resolved strength in her patient eyes and in the gentle lines of her face
had something that seemed to him sad and awful--as the purely spiritual
always looks to the more animal nature.
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