There were half-a-dozen of the girls together,—pretty creatures, in the very first season of their long dresses,—the eldest not quite sixteen. They were all braids and puffs and fluffy curls, all loops and ruffles and ribbons, all smiles and dimples. It was the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, in a certain year of grace, of which I will not give you the precise date, but less than ten years ago, and more than five. Of the half-dozen girls, two are busy teachers now, two are married, one is playing mother to her brother’s little brood of orphan children, and the sixth, not less happy than the rest, has gone on to “the next country,” where they tell us she will never grow old, never be sick or sorry any more,—happy Bertha, whom, surely, God loved.

But, that day in February, none of them thought much about the future: the present was enough, with its fun and frolic, its wealth of all the pleasures which girlhood holds dear. The six were passing the long day together. Two of them were sisters and belonged in one house, and the rest had come there to be with them; for they were all going to make valentines. They had made funny ones and foolish ones, tender ones, with just a little dash of satire in them, poetic ones and prosy ones; and at last it was dinner-time, a feast of all the things that school-girls love, and these were hungry girls. At least they were all hungry girls but Nelly Hunt, and she scarcely ate any dinner at all, she was so busy thinking. She was Bertha’s sister, and this was her home and Bertha’s, and it was to the girls’ own room that the little party went back again, after they had eaten and praised Mrs. Hunt’s dinner.

“What are you thinking about, Nell?” Bertha asked, sitting on the arm of Nelly’s chair.

“These valentines,” Nelly answered slowly.

“Well, surely they need not make you sober,—they are absurd enough.”

“Yes, and it’s just because they are so absurd that they make me sober. I was wondering why we couldn’t just as well have said something to help somebody—to make somebody think—to do some good.”

“Nelly’s heroics!” cried Kate Greene flippantly. “Miss Hunt as a moral reformer!”

Nelly blushed from her pretty ears to the roots of her sunny hair; but her eyes shone clear, and there was a ring of earnestness in her voice as she answered,—

“You can laugh if you will, but I mean what I say, and I’m going to try an experiment. I will write one boy a valentine, such as I think a girl ought to write, and I’ll send it.”

“So you shall,” Bertha said gently,—Bertha always was peacemaker,—“and we’ll all go away and see mamma and the baby while you write it. When it’s done you must call us.”

“Yes, and you must show it to us,” cried Kate Greene, as she went away; “that’s only fair. We promised this morning to show each other all we sent, and we sha’n’t let you off.”

And then the five fluttered away like a flock of birds, and Nelly was quite alone.

Her task was harder than she had imagined. It is only the old, perhaps, who are sage in counsel by nature. At any rate, to give good advice did not come naturally to pretty Nelly. But she had an idea of what she wanted to say, and at last she got it said. She had written and rewritten it, and finally concluded that she could do no better, and then copied it out into her neatest handwriting before she called the others. It was a little stiff, to be sure, and preachy and high-flown, but it sounded like a lofty effort and a complete success to the listening girls. This was what it said:—

“My Valentine,—You will have plenty of fine speeches and praises, and, perhaps, of fun and fancy from others, so I shall not give you those,—I who have but one interest in you, namely, that you should be the best boy and the best man which it is possible for you to become. If you are selfish, if you are indolent, if you are mean, you will never be happy in your own society, until you have sunk so low that you don’t know the difference between goodness and badness. But if you set out to be a gentleman and a man of honor and a faithful worker, you will do good deeds and live a happy life, and be worthy the everlasting esteem of

Your Valentine.”

Nelly read it with rising color and a little quiver about her mouth, which Bertha understood; but she read it with firm voice and careful, deliberate accent.

“Then,” she said, when she had finished, “I shall burn up all the rest of my valentines, and send only this one; for it is what I mean, in earnest, and, as old Aunty Smoke says, ‘Ef it don’t do no good, it can’t do no harm.’”

“To whom shall you send it, dear?” Bertha asked gently, a little subdued by Nelly’s epistolary success.

“I hadn’t made up my mind,” Nelly answered thoughtfully; “they all need it.”

“O, send it to Joe, my cousin Joe,” cried Kitty Greene. “He is staying with us, and he needs it—bad enough. If ever a boy was full of his pranks, Joe is, and if ever a boy tormented a girl’s life out, Joe does mine.”

A color clear and bright as flame glowed on Nelly Hunt’s cheeks. Had she had dark-eyed Joe in her mind all the while? She only answered very quietly,—

“I don’t mind. I had just as lief send it to Joe. That is, I’ll send it to him if you’ll promise, on your sacred honor, never in any way to let him know who wrote it.”

“Oh, I will—true as I live and breathe I’ll never tell him, and never let him guess, if I can help it.”

“And all you girls?” Nelly asked, with the pretty pink glow deepening in her cheeks. “Will you all promise?”

And they all promised; for there was a sort of honest earnestness in Nelly’s nature to which they found it natural to yield.

So the valentine was directed in Nelly’s most neat and proper manner to “Mr. Joe Greene,” and was dropped into the post-office with the rest of the valentines the girls had written that day.

On the fifteenth the six girls were all together at school, comparing notes and exchanging confidences. But Kitty Greene drew Nelly aside, and said, while they walked up and down the hall together, their arms around each other as girls will,—

“I saw Joe get it, Nelly.”

Nelly’s pretty cheeks glowed and her eyes shone like stars, but she asked no questions. Indeed, they were scarcely necessary, for Kitty was eager enough to tell her story.

“He got it, don’t you think, along with half-a-dozen others, and he read them all before he came to this one. I knew this, you know, by the shape of the envelope. When he came to it I saw him read it all through, and then I saw him go back and read it again. I heard him say to himself,—

“‘That’s an honest letter from some little saint.’

“Then he came up to me and held it toward me, while I pretended to be very busy with my valentines. Then he asked,—

“‘Do you know that handwriting, Kit?’

“I felt like an awful little liar, but I had promised you. I stretched out my hand for it, and said carelessly,—

“‘Why, ain’t it Sue’s?’

“Sue is his sister, you know. So he thought I did not know who it came from, and he changed his mind, and put it into his pocket, and went off. When I teased him afterward to let me see it, he said,—

“‘No; there are some things a fellow would be a cad to show.’

“So I saw it hit home, and well it might. It was a tremendous letter, Nelly.”

And Kitty ended with a hug and a kiss, and a look of that loyal admiration which a girl can give another girl now and then.

When the spring came Joe Greene went away from Chester, and did not come back there any more. No doubt Nelly Hunt would have forgotten his very existence but for the valentine, which she could not forget. She used to blush, as she grew older, to think how “bumptious” it was, as she used to call it to herself. What was she, that she should have undertaken to preach a sermon to that boy? What if he remembered it only to think how presuming it was, and to laugh at it? But, luckily, he did not know from whom it came; and with that thought she cooled her blushes.

Nelly was twenty when Joe Greene came back to Chester again. And now he came as a physician, just through his studies, and anxious to build up a practice. Soon his fame grew. His patients were among the poor at first, and he cured them; and then richer people heard of it, and sent for him. But, while he took all the patients that came, he never gave up his practice among those who most needed him. His praise was in all their mouths. There had never been any doctor like this one.

Nelly was Miss Hunt now, for Bertha had gone away from her into the other, unknown country, and Nelly’s grief had made her gentle heart yet more gentle, and her helpful spirit yet more helpful.

Toward night, one summer day, she had gone to see an old woman who had been her nurse once, and had found her very ill,—quite too ill to be left alone, and certainly in need of a physician. So Nelly tore a leaf from her memorandum-book and wrote on it a few lines, begging Dr. Greene to come at once, and then called to the first passer-by and entreated him to take it to the doctor.

It was scarcely half an hour before Dr. Greene came in, quietly and gravely. He attended to his patient with that careful consideration which made all those poor souls whom he visited adore him. Then he turned to Nelly.

“Who will stay with her to-night?” he asked; “for, indeed, she hardly ought to be left alone.”

“I shall stay,” was the quiet answer.

“Then come to the door with me, please, and let me give you your directions.”

Nelly followed, and stood there, in the soft summer dusk,—a pretty picture, with the wild-rose flush dawning in her cheeks, and a new light kindling her eyes. She listened carefully to all his injunctions, and then turned as if to go. But he put out a hand to detain her.

“How very much I owe to you!” he said.

“You, how?” And a deep, deep crimson dyed Nelly’s face and throat. In that moment she thought of her “bumptious” valentine, which had not crossed her mind before for a long time.

He looked at her with a smile in his eyes, but with a face that preserved all its respectful gravity. He took a red leather case out of his pocket, and from the case he took the very old valentine which Nelly remembered so well. Then he produced the brief note she had written that afternoon; and still there was light enough left in the day to see them by, as he held them side by side.

“Your hand has matured somewhat since this valentine was written,” he remarked quietly; “but some of these letters I should know anywhere. No one could deceive me.”

“I did not suppose you had kept that foolish thing,” Nelly said, with a pitiful little quiver in her voice, as if she were just on the point of bursting into tears. “I am so ashamed!”

Dr. Joe looked at her a moment, as she stood there in the waning light,—a lovely, graceful girl from whom any man might be proud to win even a passing interest. So this was the woman, the thought of whom he had carried in his heart for years! If he had ever done any good thing, he was paid for it in the satisfaction of that hour.

“Are you sorry,” he asked slowly, “that you have helped one man to be his best self? Those words of yours were to me like the voice of my inmost soul. Since then this paper has never left me, nor have I ever ceased to strive to be worthy of the esteem of my unknown ‘valentine.’ If ever I have been generous instead of selfish, brave instead of cowardly, strong instead of weak, it has been because I have remembered the words written here, and meant to live in their spirit. Are you sorry for that? or do you grudge me the dear pleasure of thanking you?”

“No, I’m not sorry, nor do I grudge you any thing; but it was a girl’s freak, and I am not worthy of so much praise and honor.”

“It was a good girl’s good intention,” he said almost solemnly. “Let us be thankful that it succeeded.”

Nelly went back to the bedside of the old woman with a fluttering heart. How strange it seemed to think this sick woman was old enough to have outlived all anxieties except those about her pains and her supper! Had not she been young once? and had no one ever looked at her as Dr. Joe looked?

The next morning he came again. His medicine, a night’s sleep, Nelly’s care,—something seemed to have given the poor old patient a fresh lease of life. There was no need that Nelly should stay with her any more; but she went to see her daily, and it was curious how often Dr. Joe’s visits happened at the same time.

One night the doctor had left his horse at home, and he and Nelly walked away together. They talked about the lingering sunset and the soft south wind and even the old woman; for Nelly, woman-like, was struggling desperately to keep Dr. Joe from saying what she desperately wanted to hear. But, at last, it came,—a half-blunt, half-awkward speech, yet with Dr. Joe’s honest heart in it,—

“I’ve lived all these years just to earn your esteem, and now I find I don’t care a thing about that unless I can also win your love.”

I think Nelly’s answer must have satisfied him, for she is Mrs. Joseph Greene now; and that valentine—worn and old, but choicely framed—always hangs over the doctor’s study table.