Friends and Neighbors Part 38

How the stranger starts and trembles! He had not seen, in the quiet maiden, moving among and ministering to the children so un.o.btrusively, the one he had parted from years before--the one to whom he had been so false. But her voice has startled his ears with the familiar tones of yesterday.

"Ellen!" Here is an instant oblivion of all the intervening years. He has leaped back over the gulf, and stands now as he stood ere ambition and l.u.s.t for gold lured him away from the side of his first and only love. It is well both for him and the faithful maiden that he cannot so forget the past as to take her in his arms and clasp her almost wildly to his heart. But for this, conscious shame would have betrayed his deeply-repented perfidy.

And here we leave them, reader. "Contentment is better than wealth."

So the worldling proved, after a bitter experience, which may you be spared! It is far better to realize a truth perceptibly, and thence make it a rule of action, than to prove its verity in a life of sharp agony.

But how few are able to rise into such a realization!

RAINBOWS EVERYWHERE.

BENDING over a steamer's side, a face looked down into the clear, green depths of Lake Erie, where the early moonbeams were showering rainbows through the dancing spray, and chasing the white-crusted waves with serpents of gold. The face was clouded with thought, a shade too sombre, yet there glowed over it something like a reflection from the iris-hues beneath. A voice of using was borne away into the purple and vermilion haze that twilight began to fold over the bosom of the lake.

"Rainbows! Ye follow me everywhere! Gloriously your arches arose from the horizon of the prairies, when the storm-king and the G.o.d of day met within them to proclaim a treaty and an alliance. You spanned the Father of Waters with a bridge that put to the laugh man's clumsy structures of chain, and timber, and wire. You floated in a softening veil before the awful grandeur of Niagara; and here you gleam out from the light foam in the steamboat's wake.

"Grateful am I for you, oh rainbows! for the clouds, the drops, and the suns.h.i.+ne of which you are wrought, and for the gift of vision through which my spirit quaffs the wine of your beauty.

"Grateful also for faith, which hangs an ethereal halo over the fountains of earthly joy, and wraps grief in robes so resplendent that, like Iris of the olden time, she is at once recognised as a messenger from Heaven.

"Blessings on sorrow, whether past or to come! for in the clear s.h.i.+ning of heavenly love, every tear-drop becomes a pearl. The storm of affliction crushes weak human nature to the dust; the glory of the eternal light overpowers it; but, in the softened union of both, the stricken spirit beholds the bow of promise, and knows that it shall not utterly be destroyed. When we say that for us there is nothing but darkness and tears, it is because we are weakly brooding over the shadows within us. If we dared look up, and face our sorrow, we should see upon it the seal of G.o.d's love, and be calm.

"Grant me, Father of Light, whenever my eyes droop heavily with the rain of grief, at least to see the reflection of thy signet-bow upon the waves over which I am sailing unto thee. And through the steady toiling of the voyage, through the smiles and tears of every day's progress, let the iris-flash appear, even as now it brightens the spray that rebounds from the labouring wheels."

The voice died away into darkness which returned no answer to its murmurings. The face vanished from the boat's side, but a flood of light was pouring into the serene depths of a trusting soul.

THE END.