Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

mother made and the Lord gave when you and the world were young. Seven years you stuck to the old mill, and then you were only fifteen; and then, just as they were crowning the Queen, you know, you had to give it up, and to give the home up with it; to go out, and never return to stay. And so I lost sight of you out of that hard but blessed life in and out of the factory, and have never set eyes on you until to-day, you dear lit

tle other one, that was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found." That was how I came to think of my story, and how I might tell it as a word of encouragement to many who may need such a word, about the way of life which I have travelled many miles since I set out, not knowing whither I went, to the pulpit and pastorate of Unity Church.

But I cannot tell the story I want to tell, if I let myself drift away just here from the boy in the mill on the Washburne, and say no more about him. I like him well enough, after all these years, to stay beside him a little longer; and, beside this, he had a great deal to do with the making of as much of a man as is now at the other end of this pen. I notice in Bunyan's "Pilgrim," how all the characters that great dreamer creates are so far hardened in the mould before he lets us see them, that we feel all the time it is a foregone conclusion. Obstinate, Pliable, Ignorance, and the rest on that side, are bound to come to grief; while Christian,

Hopeful, and Faithful are sure to reach the Shining

Something like Before we begin

City, no matter what may befall. this is true of our common life. to live to much purpose anyway, the things are gathered and laid up that are to make or mar us. We are not aware of it, any more than the young birds, as they flutter out of the nest to do for themselves, are aware how they will be sure to find out when to go North or South, and how to build and line their own nests, and where and what to seek for their callow brood. has taken care of that; dence do together for the ture alone does for the bird. I have heard that the nuns who teach in convent schools say, "Let us have the Protestant child until it is seven years old, and then we have no fear for the future it is sure to come at last into the Church." I imagine as a rule, this is true; and usually, when Protestant parents pay for the education of their children in those schools, they pay for an item that is not in the bill, their conversion to Romanism. It has been noticed, too, how when German children come here from the Fatherland, and eagerly turn to the English tongue, giving up their native speech, it is no matter how long they live in that habit, if the old man, who has not spoken a word of German since he was a child, loses himself in his last moments, he then goes back to the other

But it is all there. Nature and Nature and Provifledging child what Na

self,

the fellow of the one I saw in the old mill, and talks German again. So the poor old knight whose life as a man had been one great, gluttonous sin, forgot for a moment on his deathbed his own awful remorse, and the blasting of his hopes by the breath of the king, and babbled of green fields where he had wandered, no doubt, as an unfallen child, to gather king-cups and daisies, and chase the rabbit to its burrow.

That grand and hearty Englishman, Sydney Smith, used to laugh at ancestral pride, and to say the Smith crest, with which all their letters were sealed, was the Smith thumb. I cannot laugh with the lord of laughter there. I would be glad to know that I came of a great line, if it had been God's will.

About a year ago, there was a paragraph in the papers, of a murder in San Francisco, I read again and again with a wonderful interest. Col. Fairfax, so the papers said, had been stabbed in the streets of that city, by some wretch, for a fancied injury. The murdered man had strength enough left to draw his revolver, and cover his assassin, who then begged abjectly for mercy; when the dying victim said quietly, "You have killed me, and I can kill you; but I spare you, villain and coward as you are, for the sake of your wife and little children." If I were not myself, I would love to be the Fairfax who should succeed that noble fellow, not alone

for the splendid piece of chivalry, of which there was never more need than there is now, - the grace, I mean, of forbearance unto death in the face of the worst injury one man can inflict on another; not for this alone, but because that man was the last of a mighty line, whose name was the pride of all the boys of my companionship, and whose great mansion once nestled on the southern and sunny side of the high land which gave us only its northern shoulder. We were proud of the Fairfax line. It had disappeared from the country many a year before I was born; but the tradition was strong of the great Sir Thomas, who fought with Cromwell for the people against the king. And we preserved one tradition of him, how his arm was so long, that, when he stood stretched to his full height, the palm of the hand rested on the cap of the knee; and in some skirmish, also unrecorded, when our hero was met alone in one of our narrow lanes by eight or ten of the enemy, and it was one down and another come up,- Sir Thomas, by favor of his long arm and stout heart, cut down about half the number; and the rest galloped away. That Fairfax was a great figure in our juvenile Valhalla. He was one of a line of noble men, with a few exceptions, which had housed itself there at Denton for many hundreds of years. It saw good reason finally for settling in Virginia; gave a great friend to Washington, but not to the infant Republic; and

so came down to the man murdered on the Pacific coast. Pride in an ancestry like this, it must be good to feel. I think that man remembered he was a Fairfax, and must not stain his name with murder for murder; and that had something to do with his noble forbearance. He must die like a Fairfax. Such persons bring with them into the world a vast advantage over the common run of us. Their organism is like the organ of a great maker, something unique for its sweetness or strength; and the soul, like a great organist, makes a music that is all its own. I think we would all, please God, belong to a line like this. It is something still in our life, like the separate line of David, by which should be born, in the fulness of time, the greatest of all the figures in human history. But when that cannot be, what we may all be glad and proud of is a line that is good as far as it goes. This is the way I feel about the little man who was to worry out of that factory somehow into a pulpit. The line began with the father and mother. There was a grandfather who fought under Nelson, and went overboard, one black night, in a storm: he was on the father's side. And then, on the mother's side, there was another sailor, who went down the sea in a ship that never came up again. Then there were two widows who fought the wolf while they were able, and died presently of the fight.

« AnteriorContinuar »