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A MESS OF POTTAGE

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 13, 1901

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 78, No. 33.

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A MESS OF POTTAGE.

By Sallie Brown

Sallie Brown, in Baptist Standard.
SHE was a plain, unassuming woman, moderately talented and good-looking. She played on the piano and sang ordinarily well, had painted two or three pictures, assisted by her teacher, that were very good for an amateur.
After she left school, she read a great deal, and at her marriage was regarded as a woman of more than average intelligence. If she surpassed in any one thing, it was her dainty needlework.
When she married John, they were both poor, and their home necessarily modest, though he made a good salary, which sufficed for their needs, besides leaving a margin for the proverbial “rainy day;” so she spent every spare moment at needlework designed to adorn her home. Before this was completed, to her satisfaction, a friend asked that she would do some for her. Other friends came with the same request. She did it first to accommodate them; but as other orders came, there was born within her that human desire to earn something. She thought of the beautiful things she could have in her home, from these earnings, that she could not otherwise afford.
Orders became more frequent, and she had to neglect her music to fill them. Soon she dropped it altogether, and the piano, that she had brought from her old home to her new one, remained closed week after week.
As the absorption grew, her reading began to suffer until she scarcely read at all. She worked even at evening, persuading herself that needlework was no harder on her eyes than reading.
Her social duties soon followed her reading, and beyond her necessary home duties she spent her entire time on fancy work.
She spent all her earnings on her home. Books, pictures, bric-a-brac, china, rugs, all the pretty things that delight a refined woman’s heart, began to accumulate about her. By and by she would rest and enjoy them all, she thought; but there was always something else in view to work for.
Her friends often warned her against ruining her eyes, to which she always declared that the first time she felt any evil effect she was going to stop at once, but she did not really think it would hurt them, for she had unusually strong eyes.
She had been married several years, when one day, about two months before Christmas, there came a dull, tired feeling into her eyes. The next day it was worse, and she took a half day’s rest. She could not rest longer, for she had taken an unusually large number of orders that fall, because the children were both in school now, and she had more time. She had promised to fill them all by Christmas, after that she would take her long-promised rest.
Her eyes began to pain her frequently, then to burn, and her head to ache, but she worked on all the more eagerly, fearing she might be compelled to stop. At last she finished, and put her home in order for the holidays. She expected her eyes to get better as soon as her work was done, but instead they grew worse. The day after Christmas she woke to find that the first rays of the morning sun, coming in at her window, brought a moan of pain to her lips. She drew down the blind, and sat all day in the shadow. It seemed that day would never end. The next was the same, the next, and the next. She called in her family physician; he passed the case on to the oculist. The latter, after a careful examination, told her gravely that she would barely escape with her sight; also that she must spend months in this darkened house.
After he was gone, she wandered disconsolately from room to room. How could she employ her time, she who was miserable if she lacked employment for an hour?
She paused before the book shelves in the hall, which served as library. Now that she could not read, she felt starved without it. She could readily put her hands on her favorite books, but could not read even their names.
She passed on to the tiny parlor; opening the piano, she tried some of her old music, first idly, then in earnest. She remembered little. Covering her face with her hands, she sobbed aloud.
When she was calmer, she glanced about at the things for which she had toiled so unceasingly. Already some of them were broken or looked worn and old. They all suddenly became a burden to her. How gladly she would give them all for her birthright—her strong young eyes.
Daily she spent hours in her easy chair with closed eyes, thinking, thinking. She had ample time to think of her past, narrow, selfish life; of the neighbor who lay sick for days whom she had not found time to visit; of a poor widow who had lived near in actual want, to whom she had intended to carry some of the children’s good outgrown garments. That, too, had stopped with the intention. One old friend’s husband had failed in business, another’s only daughter had married and gone away, another’s baby had been carried, like her own, away to the silent city out on the hill. She could have been a comfort to them all, but she had not. Oh, yes, she had abundant time for reflection now, for few came to cheer her loneliness. How eagerly she waited for the children to come from school; how she enjoyed their childish glee; she even romped with them, told them stories, entered into all their joys and sorrows as she had never found time to do before.
Best of all were the quiet evenings after the children were asleep, when she could sit with bandaged eyes and listen to John, dear, faithful John, read beautiful, helpful things that strengthened her for her next day’s enforced idleness. How beautiful life seemed when she could take her first short walk in the daylight. Her heart overflowed with gratitude when she could again take up her household duties, visit her friends, take her music up and attend to her flowers, but her joy knew no bounds when she could read again.
How near to total blindness she came none but she and the oculist ever knew. Her months of rest were not lost, for she came out a better, broader, wiser woman.