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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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with a start, all faded, and he saw again the cane-brakes and cypresses and gliding plantations, and heard again the creaking and groaning of the machinery, all tell- ing him too plainly that all that phase of life had gone by forever. In such a case, you write to your wife, and send messages to your children; but Tom could not write,- the mail for him had no existence, and the gulf of sepa- ration was unbridged by even a friendly word or signal. Is it strange, then, that some tears fall on the pages of his Bible, as he lays it on the cotton-bale, and, with patient finger, threading his slow way from word to word, traces out its promises? Having learned late in life, Tom was but a slow reader, and passed on laboriously from verse to verse. Fortunate for him was it that the book he was intent on was one which slow reading cannot injure,- nay, one whose words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to be weighed sepa- rately, that the mind may take in their priceless value. Let us follow him a mo- ment, as, pointing to each word, and pronouncing each half aloud, he reads, “Let-not-your-heart-be-troubled. In-my-Father’s-house-are-many-man- sions. I-go-to-prepare-a-place-for-you.” Cicero, when he buried his darling and only daughter, had a heart as full of honest grief as poor Tom’s-perhaps no fuller, for both were only men;- but Cicero could pause over no such sublime words of hope, and look to no such fu- ture reunion; and if he had seen them, ten to one he would not have believed,- he must fill his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of manuscript, and correctness of translation. But, to poor Tom, there it lay, just what he needed, |
