How he wished he, too, could read! "What, can't you
read? O, let me teach you!"--"You never can; I was too
thick-skulled to learn even at school. I am sure I never
could now." But Edith was not to be daunted by any fancies
of incapacity, and set to work with utmost zeal to teach this
great grown man the primer. She succeeded, and won his heart
thereby. He wished to requite the raising him from the night
of ignorance, as Howard and Nicholas Poussin did the kind ones
who raised them from the night of the tomb, by the gift of his
hand. Edith consented, on condition that she might still keep
school. So he had his sister come to "keep things straight."
Edith and he go out in the morning,--he to his field, she to
her school, and meet again at eventide, to talk, and plan and,
I hope, to read also.
'The first use Edith made of her accession of property
through her wedded estate, was to give away all she thought
superfluous to a poor family she had long pitied, and
to invite a poor sick woman to her "spare chamber."
Notwithstanding a course like this, her husband has grown
rich, and proves that the pattern of the widow's cruse was not
lost in Jewry.
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