[Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman by Austin Steward]@TWC D-Link bookTwenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman CHAPTER XXXV 9/10
How hard to believe that the fell destroyer was upon her track! Her education had qualified her for teaching the sciences; but now I saw, that her faith in the religion of the blessed Christ, was assisting her to teach her own heart a lesson of patience, and quiet submission to the will of Him who holds the issues of life,--and Oh, how difficult for us to learn the solemn lesson, that her wasting form, her gradual sinking away, was hourly setting before us. Slowly her strength failed; she, however, saw our sorrowful anxiety, and would try to relieve it with a cheerful appearance.
One day perhaps she would be able to walk about, which would revive our wavering hope; the next she was prostrate and suffering; then hope died and we were sad! All the spring time she languished; the summer came, the roses bloomed, and the grain began to ripen, but she was wasting away.
The orchard yielded its golden harvest; the birds sang merrily on the trees, but a dark shadow had fallen on our hearthstone, and a gloom, like the pall of death, rested on our household.
Her place at table was already vacant; no longer she called the little ones about her to hear them repeat their tasks,--all of which admonished us, that soon the bed where we could now see her, would be vacated; and we should no longer witness her patient smile, and know that she was still with us.
The pastor of the Baptist church often called to pray with, and for, the quiet sufferer, which she appreciated very highly, for she was a Christian in every sense of the word. On the thirtieth day of August, at about eleven o'clock, A.M., without a struggle or a groan, her spirit returned to God who gave it.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|