A story from the past

One of my favorite stories about Edgar Tufts, who was introduced in my last post: As the local minister in a remote part of the North Carolina mountains where NC, Tennessee and Virginia intersect, Reverend Tufts would visit on horseback to homes in the mountains. Sometimes he was their only visitor. He visited a family that was very poor and found that the mother was dying. She had a young and sickly baby besides the other children in the family. The baby was dying since she couldn't nurse and the family had no milk. They had been giving the baby bread soaked in coffee. The mother said she could die in peace if only she knew the baby would be taken care of. Reverend Tufts came back to his wife and told her of the problem. In the book "The Sacred Flame" written by his granddaughter, it describes how he let his horse pick it's way down the mountain in the dark as he held the infant in his arms. Mrs. Tufts slowly nursed the little boy back to health and he grew up with their family but he never forgot his real family. He asked if he could take the name Tufts as his middle name. When I told my mother about this touching story, she said, "I knew that little boy!" My mother went to school with him when she lived at Grandfather Home which was being run by then by Edgar's son also called Edgar Tufts. Isn't that a great story?