twenty years at hull house

copy of the Vulgate, and gravely repeated it every night in an execrahie pronunciation because it seemed to us more religious than "plain

English."

When, however, I really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a

most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday

school, portraying the Lord upon His throne surrounded by tiers and

tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am ashamed to tell

how old I was when that picture ceased to appear before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to ask protection trom

the Heavenly powers.

I recall with great distinctness my first direct contact with death

* when I was fifteen years old: Polly was an old nurse who had taken care

of my mother and had followed her to frontier Illinois to help rear a

second generation of children. She had always lived in our house, but

made annual visits to her cousins on a farm a few miles north of the

village. During one of these visits, word came to us one Sunday evening that Polly was dying, and for a number of reasons I was the only

person able to go to her. I left the lamp- lit, warm house to be driven

four miles through a blinding storm which every minute added more

snow to the already high drifts, with a sense of starting upon a fateful

errand. An hour after my arrival all of the cousins' family went downstairs to supper, and I was left alone to watch with Polly. The square,

old-fashioned chamber in the lonely farmhouse was very cold and still,

with nothing to be heard but the storm outside. Suddenly the great

change came. 1 heard a feeble call of "Sarah," my mother's name, as the dying eyes were turned upon me, followed by a curious breathing

and in place of the face familiar from my earliest childhood and associated with homely household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange,

august features, stern and withdrawn from all the small affairs of life.

That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of childhood's timidity

and which is far from outgrown at fifteen, seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and summon the family from below.

As I was driven home in the winter storm, the wind through the

trees seemed laden with a passing soul and the riddle of life and death

pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old, and to die, everything

came to that, and then a mysterious journey out into the Unknown.

Did she mind faring forth alone? Would the journey perhaps end in