She was a mother.

One who is mother only to her own children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children.

But here was one of God's mothers.
Loneliness and silence, and constant homely familiarity with the vast simplicities of nature, assist much in the development of the deeper and more wonderful faculties of perception.

The perceptions themselves may take this or that shape according to the education--may even embody themselves fantastically, yet be no less perceptions.

Now the very moment before Gibbie entered, she had been reading the words of the Lord: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me"; and with her heart full of them, she lifted her eyes and saw Gibbie.