Soaring Higher to do the Best She Could

George Shinn in 1875 was summoned once at midnight to the bedside of an old woman who lived by herself without much in the way of either money or friends and was dying. She managed to convey that she wanted some other woman to come stay with her for such time as might have left, so George Shinn and the old woman’s doctor struck out in the darkness to try to dig one up for her.

It sounds like a parable the way it is told and I am inclined to believe that if someone were ever to tell the tory of...