suffering."

"Then I will take her away immediately," replied Mercy, in as confident
and simple a manner as if she had been proposing only to move her from one
room into another. It would not seem so easy a matter for two lonely
women, in a little Cape Cod village, without a male relative to help them,
and with only a few thousand dollars in the world, to sell their house,
break up all their life-long associations, and go out into the world to
find a new home. Associations crystallize around people in lonely and out
of the way spots, where the days are all alike, and years follow years in
an undeviating monotony. Perhaps the process might be more aptly called
one of petrifaction. There are pieces of exquisite agate which were once
soft wood. Ages ago, the bit of wood fell into a stream, where the water
was largely impregnated with some chemical matter which had the power to
eat out the fibre of the wood, and in each spot thus left empty to deposit
itself in an exact image of the wood it had eaten away. Molecule by
molecule, in a mystery too small for human eye to detect, even had a
watchful human eye been lying in wait to observe, the marvellous process
went on; until, after the lapse of nobody knows how many centuries, the
wood was gone, and in its place lay its exact image in stone,--rings of
growth, individual peculiarities of structure, knots, broken slivers and
chips; color, shape, all perfect. Men call it agatized wood, by a feeble
effort to translate the mystery of its existence; but it is not wood,
except to the eye. To the touch, and in fact, it is stone,--hard, cold,
unalterable, eternal stone. The slow wear of monotonous life in a set
groove does very much such a thing as this to human beings. To the eye
they retain the semblance of other beings; but try them by touch, that is
by contact with people, with events outside their groove, and they are
stone,--agatized men and women. Carry them where you please, after they
have reached middle or old age, and they will not change. There is no