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CHAPTER XX.
LIFE PICTURES AND LIFE WORK.
The pictures Louis painted were not on canvas, but living, breathing
entities, and my heart rejoiced as the years rolled over us that the
brush he wielded with such consummate skill was touched also by my hand;
that it had been able to verify Clara's "Emily will do it," and that now
in the days that came I heard her say "Louis and Emily are doing great
good." I think nothing is really pleasure as compared with the
blessedness of benefitting others.
My experience in my earliest years had taught me to believe gold could
buy all we desired, but after Clara came to us and one by one the burden
of daily planning to do much with very little fell out of our lives, and
the feeling came to us that we had before us a wider path, with more
privileges than we had ever before known, I found the truth under it
all, that the want of a dollar is not the greatest one in life, neither
the work and struggle "to make both ends meet," as we said, the hardest
to enforce.
It was good to know my parents were now free from petty anxieties, that
no unsettled bills hung over my father's head like threatening clouds,
and that my mother could, if she would, take more time; to herself.
Indeed she was forced to be less busy with hard work, for Aunt Hildy
worked with power and reigned supreme here, and I helped her in every
way. It was the help that came in these ways, I firmly believed, that
saved mother's life and kept her with us.
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