Part 5

Just one hour before the young lady was to go on the stage to sing her solo, a dispatch brought the sad and shocking news that her mother was dead. Nobody who knew of the sad news thought for a moment that the bereaved and heartbroken girl would attempt to sing. They were all disappointed, of course, but who could ask her to go on the stage with a sorrow as deep as hers? But she did not break down. Oh, she had been so confident of winning the prize, and her town’s people would be so greatly disappointed if she failed!

She told the manager she would try, providing he would tell the audience of her great sorrow. She wanted the sympathy of the people—it would give her strength, while it would give them patience and tolerance.

After the manager had gone before the footlights and told the sad story the people waited in silence for the young singer to appear. There was no applause. The people felt the presence of death, or sorrow and heart aches. The accompanist struck the first note and the brave girl commenced to sing. The song was suitable for a sad heart to sing. She could sing her sorrow from the depths of her soul.

The crowded house sat spellbound. That song from her soul of sorrow thrilled every heart as it had never been thrilled before. The notes, clear and sweet, came laden with the tears her brave soul was holding back. The people sat in deep silence, but with beating and throbbing hearts and active minds. They pictured the dead mother in that distant town, sleeping silence—ah, never again, never to awaken to greet her daughter on her return.

And the singer pictured that angeled mother listening from that far off shore, and she sang to her while the audience listened. For as much as a minute the people sat in silence after the singer had left the stage, and then the cheers and tears told of the prize she had won.

VISITING THE OLD HOME

My last visit to the home of my childhood filled me with gloomy thoughts. Nothing remained of the old home but the ruins of the cellar walls. The house had been torn down and removed from the spot. I had expected to wander through the deserted rooms and try to recall the old hopes and memories that filled my soul when I lived in the old log cottage. These memories came back but slowly, because the old landmarks had been removed and there was nothing to suggest the old incidents that filled my life when a boy.

The location of the house was in a deep, narrow valley, with hills on three sides and a dense woods in front, with no other human habitation in sight. It was in this secluded spot I dreamed the dreams of dissatisfied youth. And yet these dreams are very dear to me now, as I dig them out of memory, clothed in their old rags and hunger and famished ambition. The memories of the pain I suffered in this dreamy spot came back to me like old friends who suffered with me in those days.

It was here that I held my dear old father’s hand while he passed over the bar and drifted out on the Sea of Death. How plainly the scene comes back to me as I stand on the crumbling walls and recall every feature of the room in which he passed away. He asked for me in the last hour and requested me to stay with him. Perhaps he understood me better than the older boys, or he may have believed that I understood him best of all the family.

It was not his desire to go. He had hoped for ten more years of life, but now he realized that the end was near at hand. He spoke not a word of being prepared to go nor did he ask me to meet him in heaven. He belonged to the class of thinkers who do not know, and, realizing that he knew nothing of the future, did not speculate on possibilities. The last words he said were: “You may look upon men when dying, but ah, my son, you will never know what death is until you come to die yourself!”

These words have haunted me all through life, and I often think of the dreaded experience he prophesied for me. At that hour I could have gone away with him contentedly, and I really wished then, while I held his hand, that we two could go out together, and I never, never return.

But I could not keep my mind on death even then; for I noted the droning of a bumble bee that beats its head against the window and tried to escape from the room. And while looking at the bee I noted the voice of a catbird out in the orchard, singing his sweetest notes. I tried to locate him, and did finally detect him sitting on the branch of an apple tree father had planted for me when I was yet a child. Then a bluebird lit on a tall weed just outside the window: the weed bent and the winds caused the bird to dance and sway up and down, and from right to left.

And there was sobbing and crying in the outer room. My old mother was heartbroken at the parting and my older brother was trying to console her. When the catbird flew away, followed by the blue one—the bumble bee found the raised window and flew away. Then I turned to the bed—father had likewise gone away. Only the cold clay remained.

Standing on the ruins of the old home I recalled it all once more as vividly as though it happened but yesterday.

How strangely we live, how strangely we die, how strangely we live on after loved ones have gone from us. How strangely we recall the old scenes when they are suggested to us by a chain of memories passing through our mind. Ah, many of my old hopes and ambitions lie now in ruins more complete than the old walls of my childhood’s home. Many of the people I met in this old home were closely connected with those old hopes that have crumbled into gloomy dreams. Still I live on and hope on—new hopes and a new life.

THE WAYWARD BOY

Today I want to talk to the boys who neglect their mother. They are not all bad boys, but all are careless and thoughtless boys. At an early age these wayward boys go away from home and leave a fond mother to worry and fret and grieve over their absence. Some times they neglect to write home for years and years, leaving the dear old mother to nurse her lonely and hungry heart and hug the old, old memories when her boy was but a child. If any wayward and wandering young man should chance to read these lines—any wayward boy who knows of a mother waiting at home—won’t he sit down this very day and write her a few lines?

I have for a neighbor a loving mother who is wasting her life in grieving for her wayward son. He went away two years ago, and has never written her a single line. He is a wanderer on the earth, working a few weeks at one place, then jumps a freight train and rides to new scenes. About a year ago the mother dreamed an awful dream about her boy. In that vision she was in a strange land sitting under a large tree on a sloping hill, around whose base a railroad curved and stretched out for miles on either side. She looked away to the east, and saw the smoke of an approaching train. It was coming like the wind.

Then she heard the whistles of a locomotive in the west, and looking in that direction she beheld another train sweeping down the track to meet the one coming from the east.

There was only a single track. One of the trains must pull into a switch, or there would be a collision. The trainmen could not see around the curve, and were not aware of the other train’s existence. She rushed to the brow of the hill where she could look down upon the track and took off her skirt and waved it aloft to signal the on-coming trains. Neither engineer saw her, and the trains came rushing onward to their inevitable doom. As the train from the east passed where she stood she saw a man sitting on the bumpers between two red cars. He looked up and waved his hand to her. She recognized the face—it was her son Edward!

Then came the shrill whistles of the two locomotives. The engineers had discovered their danger when too late to save the trains. She stood fascinated and watched the two iron monsters come together with an awful crash. They stood up on end like two angry animals in deadly combat, and the sound of crashing, tumbling cars drowned the noise of the escaping steam. The two locomotives tumbled over, tearing and wrenching iron bars from each other as they fell and then lay with heads together like two giants of the woods who had fought to the death and lay with tooth and claws imbedded in each other’s body. A few freight cars that were standing on end fell over with a crashing sound, a cloud of dust arose from the awful wreck, a hissing sound of escaping steam continued for a few minutes, and then all was still. The hand of death seemed to grasp trains and crews, and silence settled down with an awful significance. She felt herself fainting, just as the moans and cries of human beings in distress reached her ears.

When she came to and looked down upon the wreck it was night, but lanterns flitted here and there on both sides of the dead engines, and a voice asked: “Have we found all the men belonging to the ill-fated crews?” and a voice just below where she stood replied: “Yes, all of the two crews, and the body of a hobo besides—they are all dead but two brakemen, and they are still unconscious.”

She looked down the embankment and saw the dead stretched out upon the ground and at the east end of the line she recognized her son Edward—dead and covered with his own blood.

She screamed aloud and her daughter came into the room to see what was the cause of her alarm. That was a year ago. Her boy has never written since, and she firmly believes her Edward was killed just as she saw in her dream. If he is still alive somewhere in the world, think of the joy he could send her in just a short letter—just enough to show her that he is still alive. Boys, write to your mother. She may be dreaming of you.

A WASTED LIFE

Across the river from where I now live stands the old, old house where the man of the wasted life was born. I did not know him as a boy, but the old people of the neighborhood spoke of him as the handsomest boy on the McElhattan side, and the place was noted for handsome people. He was a full grown man when I first saw him, while I was yet a boy. How handsome he was, standing six feet tall, with eyes and hair coal black and a face that showed the brain force seething behind the beautiful mask.

His discontent was transparent to every reader of the human face. Even the droop of his dark mustache reminded one of the weeping willow branches hanging disconsolate over the tomb where sleeps the beloved dead.

When I first met him I was only just awakening to the hopeless condition of my future life. Weak of body and with an untrained intellect, his broad education and power of deep meditation made him to tower above me like a mountain towering above a mouse; but he stooped to meet me half way, showing me the interior of his disappointed soul and receiving my sincere sympathy in exchange. At the hotel, where we many nights slept together in the same bed, the people complained of us talking all night long, to the annoyance of the other lodgers. And it was true. Many the night we lay in the dark and discussed everything on top of the earth, even going out of our sphere to discuss the orthodox dream of heaven.

One night he spoke of the words that should some time decorate his tomb, and I still regret that I never mentioned his request to his relatives and family, and that now his marker does not display these solemn words:

“I am what was, what is, and what is to be; and no living man shall ever roll away the stone that closes the door to the mystery into which I go. What is, is right or else the whole universe is wrong. I am not lost or wasted, for the economy of Nature hoards all the wealth of the world in a grasp that crushes life to get back her own.”

What made this sublime thinker a bit of flotsam on the sea of Time? He told me once when in a confidential mood that the loss of the one woman he loved darkened his life and drove him to drink. The woman married another, and was still living when he told me his story, but he did not tell me who she was, nor whose fault it was that she became lost to him.

How I pitied the big man, whose heart was as tender as that of a refined woman. What a power he could have been in the intellectual world if mated to the one woman he loved. When he lost her his grasp on ambition and enthusiasm weakened and he folded the desires of his soul into a shapeless mass and sat down upon them to brood over his loss.

Poor M——! Chained to his early disappointment, and intellectually so far removed from his plodding neighbors that none thought it necessary to offer him their sympathy. How little the average man knows the average human heart. Education only strengthens the soul’s hunger for sympathy, love and fellowship, and because I sympathized with the man of the wasted life, and he sympathized with me in my almost hopeless struggles, a warm friendship grew up between us, and he allowed me to see farther into the shadows that shrouded his disappointed soul than any of his family ever penetrated.

He was one of those retentive minds that could not forget, and he tried to dull the pain at his heart with drink. Sometimes he would make a strong effort to reform and rebuild his wasted resolutions, and for several months he would toil on the farm like a hired man. But his mind was too active for such a vegetable existence, and his books would take him out of the fields of physical labor. Then the old discontent, the memory of the old love would fill his soul and again he would drown everything in liquor, like a second Edgar Allen Poe. In one of these sprees he died, and his wasted life ended in a death that shocked his many friends.

GARRET MEMORIES

My boy expressed a fear to go up on to the attic one day recently, and when I asked him what he found to fear up in a dusty old garret, he said there was so much old stuff up there that belonged to people who were dead, and if these old things had memories they must surely be thinking of the old days and the old friends, and had no welcome for the boys of the present generation.

Well, wife and I know the old garret has many memories, or at least articles that suggest old memories, and we seldom make a trip to the old store house of family heirlooms without coming away with a queer feeling of loneliness tugging at our hearts. No doubt the boy has often detected the subdued and solemn expression on our sobered faces; and learned his lesson of awe and veneration from reading the lines and shadows he has so often seen there.

The last time we were up on the garret, the three of us, we set about digging up old memories, because a lady’s side saddle hanging to a rafter started us to digging up some old family lore. The saddle belonged to wife’s great-grandmother, and is almost a century old. It was on this saddle her great-grandmother made the ride of nine miles through the dark to warn her father that burglars were trying to break into their house.

It seems her father sold some cattle and hogs a few days previously and had the money locked up in the bureau of his room. It was for this reason that the daughter and the hired girl were told to take the twins, and the four of them sleep in this particular room every night, while the parents attended camp meeting. Some great revivalist on the style of Peter Cartright was stirring up the people and everybody for miles around flocked to the camp meeting and pitched their tents and were prepared to spend several days on the camp ground.

There were several bad characters in the neighborhood and they knew the old squire had money in the house because he hadn’t been to town since selling the cattle and would hardly carry it with him to camp meeting. On the second night after the squire and his wife had left home three men broke through a kitchen window and began a search of the first floor rooms, knowing the hired man and the boys slept up stairs.

When they discovered that some one inside the squire’s room was holding the bolt in place they threatened to kill everybody inside the room if they didn’t let them in. The twins (girls of six) screamed aloud on hearing this threat, and their older sister called to the hired man up stairs to come to their assistance. But no answer came from the upper precincts. The hired man and the boys were too much scared to even make any reply.

Then it was that the sister unbolted the window and crawled through and dropped to the ground, ran quietly to the stable and saddled her horse, with this very saddle, and rushed off to the distant camp ground through a darkness that would frighten women of less nerve. Almost breathless she reached the camp meeting just when the shouting hilarity was the highest, and was told that her father was at the altar seeking salvation.

Without stopping to ask permission of anybody she walked swiftly up the aisle to where her father was kneeling, recognizing him by the green coat he wore, stooped and whispered in his ear: “Come home, father, at once; there are burglars trying to break into the house!”

“Hell!” he exclaimed loud enough to be heard by the mourner on either side of him, and said no more until he had saddled his own horse just back of the camp ground, and the two galloped back home in time to prevent the robbery. The burglars had taken their own good time to cut a hole through the door, through which they could reach a hand and pull back the wooden bolt; but the brave hired girl had stabbed the hand with a pair of scissors every time it was thrust through, and thus protected the house until the arrival of the squire and his fearless daughter.

The burglar on watch outside the house heard the approaching horses, and warning his two pals inside, they all escaped. Next day the burglar with the scissors wounds on his hands was arrested, and finally confessed and gave the names of his pals, and the trio served two years in prison.

No, the family history doesn’t enlighten us as to whether the old squire went back to camp meeting to resume his prayers for salvation, or not. Quite likely the saving of his cattle and hog money satisfied him for that particular season. Men weren’t as greedy in those days as they are now, and he may have left the great supply of saving grace for others to enjoy.

YOUR BABY STILL

A short time ago an old schoolmate friend wrote me that they had lost their darling—a baby boy of ten months, and the mother was grieving herself sick over her great loss. “Couldn’t you write something to console her—something to make a bright spot out in the future to look ahead to with hope?” he wrote. How easy to ask this, but how hard to comply. How impossible to wipe away the sorrow from a bleeding heart and persuade the heart to cease bleeding and the bereaved soul to cease its grieving.

After a little thought it struck me forcibly that the memories and recollections of a dead child must always picture the child as it was when death took it away. And I sat down and put myself in that mother’s place and wrote as though I were writing the words of hope that sometime would surely fill her loving soul. I print them now for the hundreds of other sorrowing mothers who see before them, day and night, the dear face of their darling who sleeps out in the church yard, the land where babies never grow old.

I could write out of that mother’s heart, because I, too, have a baby sleeping in the land of perpetual youth. Had she lived she would now be a grown woman—perhaps today weeping over a little grave where her own darling lay sleeping.

Weeping over his little bier, Kissing the lips of her baby dear, Touching the eyes in their endless sleep— Dreaming, I see a mother weep. Mother, he’ll be your baby still, Let the changes bring whate’er they will; When the coming years silver your hair, You will dream of your baby fair; Other sorrows your heart may fill— He’ll be your darling baby still. Tho’ he may lie in the churchyard cold, In your dreams he’ll never grow old; In your slumbers you’ll kiss his brow, Sweet and pure as you see him now. Ah, for ever your baby will Be, in fond mem’ry, your baby still!

Other mothers are happy today Kissing their darling’s tears away, Looking far out in the world so wide, Swelling their mother-heart with pride; For they see their child to manhood grown— Proud are they to call him their own; Dreaming dreams of all he shall be— The man they picture—the man they see; Proud and defiant, leader of men, Making history with tongue and pen. Surely their baby must change to be The full grown man of the picture they see.

Ah, better for her and her mother pride, Better, ah, better that child had died With innocent smile on his baby face, Than live to manhood and disgrace.

“What news is this? Oh, tell me true! What did the boy of my fond hopes do? Murdered his sweetheart? Oh, loving God! This comes from the wicked path he trod. A drunken quarrel? She led him on! And he’s a murderer! my son, my son!”