Winter Evening Tales

Poverty has not only many learned disciples, but also many hidden saints and martyrs.  There are humble tenements that are tabernacles, and desolate, wretched rooms that are the quarries of the Almighty—­where with toil and weariness and suffering the souls He loves are being prepared for the heavenly temple.

This is the light that relieves the deep shadow of that awful cloud of poverty which ever hangs over this rich and prosperous city.  I have been within that cloud, wet with its rain of tears, chilled with its gloomy darkness, “made free” of its innermost recesses; therefore I speak with authority when I say that even here a little child may walk and not stumble, if Jesus lead the way or hold the hand.

Nay, but children walk where strong men fall down, and young maidens enter the kingdom while yet their parents are stumbling where no light from the Golden City and “the Land very far off” reaches them.  Last winter I became very much interested in such a case.  I was going to write “Poor Mary Neil!” but that would have been the strangest misnomer.  Happy Mary Neil! rises impetuously from my heart to contradict my pen.

And yet when I first became acquainted with her condition, she was “poor” in every bitter sense of the word.

A drunkard’s eldest daughter, “the child of misery baptized with tears,” what had her seventeen years been but sad and evil ones?  Cold and hunger, cares and labors far beyond her strength sowed the seeds of early death.  For two years she struggled amid such suffering as dying lungs entail to help her mother and younger brothers and sisters, but at last she was compelled to make her bed amid sorrow and suffering which she could no longer assuage by her helpful hands and gentle words.

Her religious education had not been quite neglected, and she dimly comprehended that through the narrow valley which lay between Time and Eternity she would need a surer and more infallible guide than her own sadly precocious intellect.  Then God sent her just the help she needed—­a tender, pitiful, hopeful woman full of the love of Jesus.

Souls ripen quickly in the atmosphere of the Border Land, and very soon Mary had learned how to walk without fearing any evil.  Certain passages of Scripture burned with a supernatural glory, and made the darkness light; and there were also a few hymns which struck the finest chords in her heart, and

    “’Mid days of keenest anguish
      And nights devoid of ease,
    Filled all her soul with music
      Of wondrous melodies.”

As she neared the deeper darkness of death, this was especially remarkable of that extraordinary hymn called “The Light of Death,” by Dr. Faber.  From the first it had fascinated her.  “Has he been here that he knows just how it feels?” she asked, wonderingly, and then solemnly repeated: 

    “Saviour, what means this breadth of death,
      This space before me lying;
    These deeps where life so lingereth,
      This difficulty of dying? 
    So many turns abrupt and rude,
      Such ever-shifting grounds,
    Such strangely peopled solitudes,
      Such strangely silent sounds?’”

Her sufferings were very great, and sometimes the physical depression exerted a definable influence on her spiritual state.  Still she never lost her consciousness of the presence of her Guide and Saviour, and once, in the exhaustion of a severe paroxysm, she murmured two lines from the same grand hymn: 

    “Deeper! dark, dark, but yet I follow: 
      Tighten, dear Lord, thy clasp.”

Ah! there was something touching and noble beyond all words, in this complete reliance and perfect trust; and it never again wavered.

“Is it very dark, Mary dear?” her friend said one morning, the last for her on earth.

“Too dark to see,” she whispered, “but I can go on if Christ will hold my hand.”

After this a great solemnity shaded her face; she lost all consciousness of this world.  The frail, shadowy little body lay gray and passive, while that greatest of all struggles was going on—­the struggle of the Eternal out of Time; but her lips moved incessantly, and occasionally some speech of earth told the anxious watchers how hard the conflict was.  For instance, toward sundown she said in a voice strangely solemn and anxious: 

    “Who are we trying to avoid? 
      From whom, Lord, must we hide? 
    Oh! can the dying be decoyed,
      With the Saviour by his side?”

“Loose sands and all things sinking!” “Are we near eternity?” “Can I fall from Thee even now?” and ejaculations of similar kind, showed that the spiritual struggle was a very palpable one to her; but it ended in a great calm.  For two hours she lay in a peace that passeth understanding, and you would have said that she was dead but for a vague look of expectancy in the happy, restful face.  Then suddenly there was a lightening of the whole countenance; she stretched out her arms to meet the messenger of the King, and entered heaven with this prayer on her lips: 

    “Both hands, dear Lord, both hands.’”

Don’t doubt but she got them; their mighty strength lifted her over the dark river almost dry shod.

    “Rests she not well whose pilgrim staff and shoon
      Lie in her tent—­for on the golden street
    She walks and stumbles not on roads star strewn
      With her unsandalled feet.”