WHAT
ANNE BY
DALAND DID.
KATE
WARE.
"Thou shalt find by hearty strivin only, And truly loving, thou shalt truly live."
Anne Daland sat by the window, watching the sky. The light of the setting sun sirearned through the crimson curtain upon her face as she leaned her head on her hand. It was a sweet, thoughtful face, with its hazel eyes so calm in their clarity, its delicate mouth that, for all its ripeness, was decided, and its soft, dark hair. But its expression was more than thoughtful now; it was sad, and tears were dropping on her little, ladylike hand that rested on her cheek.
“Why Anne, what a sigh!” said a cheerful voice, and someone behind her took her face between two soft hands and turned it up to look at it.
“Is it you, cousin Mary? I didn’t know there was anybody here.”
“I just came in. Is there, Anne, room for me too in the lounge?”
Anne moved a little, and “cousiu Mary” sat down by her. She was a sweet, genial old maid, the favorite cousin of the Daland family, who always welcomed a visit from her as a sort of jubilee.
“What troubles you, Anne?” She said it in her peculiarly gentle, winning way, looking straight into Anne’s eyes as she spoke.
Her cousin tried to evade the question at first, but finally, unable to resist the charm of Mary’s manner, he frankly opened her heart to her.
“I am not half as happy as I thought I should be after I left school, cousin Mary. My life seems so aimless and useless. The little things I do every day don’t amount to anything, and I get so tired of them! I do wish, somehow, I could live differently. I don’t seem to be of any use in the world.”
“Then, Anne, why don’t you begin to do something?”
“That’s the very thing, cousin Mary. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I really have a great mind to go ‘out West’ and teach school, or go away somewhere and be a missionary and convert the heathen. "Only," Anne added emphatically, "father would never be willing."
“Ah, Anne, there is plenty for you to do at home in that case. There is work lying all round you, if you would not scorn it because it is made up of little things, and there is not the romance about it that there would be about going to Turkey on a mission. You ought not to be content while you are living, so for yourself alone. Why not do more to make your father and mother happy, Anne? Since you cannot teach the heathen, why not go out into the kitchen and teach poor Bridget to read and write? You might visit the poor and sick and do good in a thousand ways if you were only willing to practice a little self-denial.” Iler's cousin talked earnestly with her, Anno sat quietly when she had ceased, her face still turned to the window and her eyes fixed on the clouds, whose sunset glory was fast passing away, but cousin Mary knew she was thinking of what she had just said to her.
When the tea bell had rung and they got up to go into the dining room, Anne slipped her arm around her cousin’s waist and said softly, “I am glad you said what you did, cousin Mary, and I will try to live more for others and less for myself.” “I am very sorry,” said Mr. Daland, laying down the newspaper he had been reading since tea, “but I believe I shall have to give up reading in the newspapers altogether; it makes my eyes ache so,” and he sighed at the thought of it.
Anne looked up from the delightful volume of Irving she had buried herself in, hesitated a moment, then resolutely shut it up and offered to read the paper to her father. It was rather dull, reading all the ship news, prices, rent, and debates in the legislature, but she felt repaid by her father’s affectionate, “Thank you, my dear,” when she finished. She had eyes to her father every evening after that. “You have already begun to do good, Anne,' whispered cousin Mary to her as she kissed her. and said, “Good night.”
Anne sat up in her room for a good while, that evening, thinking, thinking. She saw that she had been unhappy because she was selfish, and that while discontented because she could not do some great, shining deed, she had overlooked entirely that which lay in her power to do. -
