A Memoir of William Gibbons (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3and wretched victims of sin and misery. The following letter to one of his sisters away at school will show an immediate practical lesson he drew from such scenes: New York, Nov. 18, 1851. Thee says that you have no holidays from one year's end to another. I can tell thee that in comparison with the lot of hundreds and thousands in this and all other cities, all your days arc holidays. They have to get up before it is light, and go to work, and do not stop till dark or bed-time. They not only have no holidays, but no enjoyments. They are put to work before they are ten years old, and keep at it all their lives, barely making a living. If thee will only think of the life of those less fortunate than thyself (and they are by far the greater number), thee will not complain I miss you both a great deal, and if I did not think you were learning to be textit{women (who are now very scarce), I should most heartily wish you were at home again He learned, too, from this intimate contact with the homeless and the guilty, to put a high and serious value upon the blessed restraints and inspiration of a happy domestic life. This appears, in a slight degree, in a letter written to an aunt in 1851: Thee don't know how much I count upon having, at some future time, a happy home. The chief object of my ambition is to benefit the more unfortunate and poorer classes; my next (this is a selfish one), to lead a happy, quiet, domestic life. To do the latter, I textit{must find a nice wife. If I were to say the above to some persons with whom I am acquainted, they would say that one, who loves excitement of all kinds as much as I do, could never settle down. They don't know me as well as I know myself. A happy home is my idea of heaven. This is extravagant, but I think it is true When William was seventeen...