"O, I'm So Thankful!"
Alcona County, Michigan, Feb. 6, 1878.
Mr. Editor:--For some time back I have been anxious to express my thanks through your paper, to the good ladies and others who have been instrumental in fitting up and furnishing a nice place for people to go to spend their evenings and leisure hours of the day. I am so thankful that my husband has got a nicer place to sit in than those vile whiskey dens. Now, after he leaves us in the morning, I can commence my day's labor with a light heart, feeling that he is to spend his day in real good respectable company, in a pleasant, warm room, with plenty of nice games and reading, and a lunch, if he gets hungry. How much better to think of him there than in some wicked saloon, smoking and telling funny stories.
O yes, the world seems so much brighter and warmer to his family, since the husband and father is a frequenter of the place where intellectual pleasures abound, and where the conversation is of so moral and refined a character.
Although comparatively weak and feeble, physically, yet since my husband wears the red ribbon and spends his time mostly in the cozy room fitted up for him, the great joy in my soul seems to give me strength in every muscle; and now, as I assist my little boy, evenings, in cutting and dragging our fire-wood from the swamp, the task seems so much lighter than it did a few weeks ago, before that soul-saving reading room had been established. Even the little Son realizes that our redemption has arriven; and he complains no more when his ragged shoes (being very much too large for him) catch to something and throw him down, but cheerfully assumes the perpendicular again, and patiently exerts his little half-naked limbs to gather up sufficient fuel for the coming cold night.
Hoping that the Lord may more abundantly bless those truly christian people, whose money and labor have been the means of producing so much comfort and happiness, I remain
Yours truly,
Mrs. Maria L. Porter.