"All things whatsoever ye would That men should do to you,Do ye even so to them."Our big girls and boys always made a dreadful fuss and said we would catch every disease you could mention,but mother and father were set about it,just like the big rocks in the hills.
They said they,themselves,once had been at the mercy of the people,and they knew how it felt.Mother said when they were coming here in a wagon,and she had ridden until she had to walk to rest her feet,and held a big baby until her arms became so tired she drove while father took it,and when at last they saw a house and stopped,she said if the woman hadn't invited her in,and let her cook on the stove,given her milk and eggs,and furnished her a bed to sleep in once in a while,she couldn't have reached here at all;and she never had been refused once.
Then she always quoted:"All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,do ye EVEN SO to them."Father said there were men who made a business of splitting hairs,and of finding different meanings in almost everything in the Bible.I would like to have seen any one split hairs about that,or it made to mean something else.Of all the things in the Bible that you had to do because it said to,whether you liked it or not,that was the one you struck oftenest in life and it took the hardest pull to obey.It was just the hatefulest text of any,and made you squirm most.There was no possible way to get around it.It meant,that if you liked a splinter new slate,and a sharp pencil all covered with gold paper,to make pictures and write your lessons,when Clarissa Polk sat next you and sang so low the teacher couldn't hear until she put herself to sleep on it,"I WISHT I had a slate!I wisht I HAD a slate!
I wisht I had a SLATE!Oh I WISHT I HAD A SLATE!"--it meant that you just had to wash up yours and stop making pictures yourself,and pass it over;you even had to smile when you offered it,if you did it right.I seldom got through it as the Lord would,for any one who loaned Clarissa a slate knew that it would come back with greasy,sweaty finger marks on it you almost had to dig a hole to wash off,and your pencil would be wet.And if there were the least flaw of crystal in the pencil,she found it,and bore down so hard that what she wrote never would come off.
The Lord always seemed bigger and more majestic to me,than at any other time,when I remembered that He could have known all that,and yet smiled as He loaned Clarissa His slate.And that old Bible thing meant,too,that if you would like it if you were travelling a long way,say to California to hunt gold,or even just to Indiana,to find a farm fit to live on--it meant that if you were tired,hungry,and sore,and would want to be taken in and fed and rested,you had to let in other people when they reached your house.Father and mother had been through it themselves,and they must have been tired as could be,before they reached Sarah Hood's and she took them in,and rested and fed them,even when they were only a short way from the top of the Little Hill,where next morning they looked down and stopped the wagon,until they chose the place to build their house.
Sarah Hood came along,and helped mother all day,so by night she was settled in the old cabin that was on the land,and ready to go to work making money to build a new one,and then a big house,and fix the farm all beautiful like it was then.They knew so well how it felt,that they kept one bed in the boys'room,and any man who came at dusk got his supper,to sleep there,and his breakfast,and there never was anything to pay.The girls always scolded dreadfully about the extra washing,but mother said she slept on sheets when she came out,and some one washed them.
One time Sally said:"Mother,have you ever figured out how many hundred sheets you've washed since,to pay for that?"Mother said:"No,but I just hope it will make a stack high enough for me to climb from into Heaven."Sally said:"The talk at the church always led me to think that you flew to Heaven."Mother answered:"So I get there,I don't mind if I creep."Then Sally knew it was time to stop.We always knew.And we stopped,too!
We had heard that "All things"quotation,until the first two words were as much as mother ever needed repeat of it any more,and we had cooked,washed for,and waited on people travelling,until Leon got so when he saw any one coming--of course we knew all the neighbours,and their horses and wagons and carriages--he always said:"Here comes another `Even So!'"He said we had done "even so"to people until it was about our share,but mother said our share was going to last until the Lord said,"Well done,good and faithful servant,"and took us home.She had much more about the stranger at the gate and entertaining angels unawares;why,she knew every single thing in the Bible that meant it was her duty to feed and give a bed to any one,no matter how dirty or miserable looking he was!So when Leon came in one evening at dusk and said,"There's another `Even So'coming down the Little Hill!"all of us knew that we'd have company for the night,and we had.
