The unseen good : a summer quest.

  • Royal Hospital for Incurables (London, England)
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The unseen good : a summer quest. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    Boxmoor is reached; we step out of the station, and a shy, tanned hoy is accepted as guide ; he will take us to Mrs. W.’s in Fuller’s Road. The grass is springy as with subtle streamlets beneath ; a shallow river ambles along, cattle are collecting under the larger trees ; a canal keeps its sluggish way, save when the bargemen open and close the locks, and just here is a flat-bottomed craft unloading hay. The guide leaves us at a cottage. I ask for Miss P., and am informed she does not live here now, but a little lower down. Mrs. W. says she is Miss P.’s sister-in-law, and has eight young children ; so the invalid, who required a room to herself, had recently left them. Mrs. W. sent two of the children, aged five and two and a-half years, to shew the way. Their aunt lived in a four-roomed cottage, fronted by a small garden ; the door stood wide open, and ouryoungguid.es ushered us in after a juvenile fashion. Miss P. was lying in a bed drawn close to the window ; she welcomed us cordially, and immediately entered into conversation. She said she J^red alone in the house, but two sisters-in-law lived next door and saw to her wants ; one of her brother’s children came to sleep with her, and some of the eight were always running in. I looked round the room; there were some simple ornaments, a linnet in a cage, and a busy clock making the most of its little day ; then to its bed-ridden tenant and the chubby nephew holding on to the footrail; truly, she dwelt among her own people. My invalid hostess was born in the ranks of industry; she is now forty- three years of age. At fifteen she entered service, and, in nursing her mistress’s children, caught a fever; she had not recovered, when a shock to her nervous system, in consequence of a fatal accident to the baby, aggravated the illness. She was treated at the London and St. George’s Hospitals, but paralysis came on at the age of twenty-three. Besides being very helpless, she frequently suffers from paroxysms of neuralgia, and it is, at times, heart-rending to witness her sufferings. Ten years ago M. A. P. was elected to the pension of the Hospital. She has been relieved from the intense anxiety caused by a feeling of dependence, and lives in comparative comfort. Her clergyman says, “ All her sufferings are borne with the most exemplary patience; she never utters a word of complaint, but is quite content to submit to the will of her God, and leave all in His hands.” I need not say I was well rewarded in this visit to a suffering woman. AT BOXMOOB.