The Home Mission Part 27

"But the least exposure may cause it to return."

"I will be very careful not to expose myself. I will wrap up warm and go in a carriage. I am sure there is not the least danger, mother."

"While I am sure that there is very great danger. You cannot pa.s.s from the door to the carriage, without the damp air striking upon your face, and pressing into your lungs."

"But I must not always exclude myself from the air, mother. Air and exercise, you know, the doctor says, are indispensable to health."

"Dry, not damp air. This makes the difference. But you must act for yourself, Mary. You are now a woman, and must freely act in the light of that reason which G.o.d has given you. Because I love you, and desire your welfare, I thus seek to convince you that it is wrong to expose your health to-night. Your great desire to go blinds you to the real danger, which I can fully see."

"You are over-anxious, mother," urged Mary. "I know how I feel much better than you possibly can, and I know I am well enough to go."

"I have nothing more to say, my child," returned the mother. "I wish you to act freely, but wisely. Wisely I am sure you will not act if you go to-night. A temporary illness may not alone be the consequence; your health may receive a shock from which it will never recover."

"Mother wishes to frighten me," said Mary to herself, after her mother had left the room. "But I am not to be so easily frightened.

I am sorry she makes such a serious matter about my going, for I never like to do any thing that is not agreeable to her feelings.

But I must go to this ball. William is to call for me at eight, and he would be as much disappointed as myself if I were not to go. As to making more cold, what of that? I would willingly pay the penalty of a pretty severe cold rather than miss the ball."

Against all her mother's earnestly urged objections, Mary went with her lover to the ball. She came home, at one o'clock, with a sharp pain through her breast, red spots on her cheeks, oppression of the chest, and considerable fever. On the next morning she was unable to rise from her bed. When the doctor, who was sent for, came in, he looked grave, and asked if there had been any exposure by which a fresh cold could be taken.

"She was at the ball last night," replied the mother.

"Not with your approval, madam?" he said quickly, looking with a stern expression into the mother's face.

"No, doctor. I urged her not to go; but Mary thought she knew best.

She did not believe there was any danger."

A strong expression rose to the doctor's lips, but he repressed it, lest he should needlessly alarm the patient. On retiring from her chamber, he declared the case to be a very critical one; and so it proved to be. Mary did not leave her room for some months; and when she did, it was with a const.i.tution so impaired that she could not endure the slightest fatigue, nor bear the least exposure. Neither change of climate nor medicine availed any thing toward restoring her to health. In this feeble state she married, about twelve months afterward, the young man who had accompanied her to the ball. One year from the period at which that happy event took place, she died, leaving to stranger hands a babe that needed all her tenderest care, and a husband almost broken-hearted at his loss.

This is not merely a picture from the imagination, and highly coloured. It is from nature, and every line is drawn with the pencil of truth. Hundreds of young women yearly sink into the grave, whose friends can trace to some similar act of imprudence, committed in direct opposition to the earnest persuasions of parents or friends, the cause of their premature decay and death. And too often other, and sometimes even worse, consequences than death, follow a disregard of the mother's voice of warning.

Pa.s.sING AWAY.

[From our story of "The Two Brides," we take a scene, in which some one sorrowing as those without hope may find words of consolation.]

IN the very springtime of young womanhood, the destroyer had come; and though he laid his hand upon her gently at first, yet the touch was none the less fatal. But, while her frail body wasted, her spirit remained peaceful. As the sun of her natural life sunk low in the sky, the bright auroral precursor of another day smiled along the eastern verge of her spiritual horizon. There was in her heart neither doubt, nor fear, nor shrinking.

"Dear Marion!" said Anna, dropping a tear upon her white transparent hand, as she pressed it to her lips, a few weeks after the alarming hemorrhage just mentioned; "how can you look at this event so calmly?"

They had been speaking of death, and Marion had alluded to its approach to Anna, with a strange cheerfulness, as if she felt it to be nothing more than a journey to another and far pleasanter land than that wherein she now dwelt.

"Why should I look upon this change with other than tranquil feelings?" she asked.

"Why? How can you ask such a question, sister?" returned Anna. "To me, there has been always something in the thought of death that made the blood run cold about my heart."

"This," replied Marion, with one of her sweet smiles, "is because your ideas of death have been, from the first, confused and erroneous. You thought of the cold and pulseless body; the pale winding-sheet; the narrow coffin, and the deep, dark grave. But, I do not let my thoughts rest on these. To me, death involves the idea of eternal life. I cannot think of the one without the other. Should the chrysalis tremble at the coming change?--the dull worm in its cerements shrink from the moment when, ordained by nature, it must rise into a new life, and expand its wings in the sunny air? How much less cause have I to tremble and shrink back as the hour approaches when this mortal is to put on immortality?"

"Yours is a beautiful faith," said Anna. "And its effects, as seen now that the hour from which all shrink approaches, are strongly corroborative of its truth."

"It is beautiful because it is true," replied Marion. "There is no real beauty that is not the form of something good and true."

"If I were as good as you, I might not shrink from death," remarked Anna, with a transient sigh.

"I hope you are better than I am, dear; and think you are," said Marion.

"Oh, no!" quickly returned Anna.

"Do you purpose evil in your heart?" asked Marion, seriously.

Anna seemed half surprised at the question.

"Evil! Evil! I hope not," she replied, as a shadow came over her face.

"It is an evil purpose only that should make us fear death, Anna; for therein lies the only cause of fear. Death, to those who love themselves and the world above every thing else, is a sad event; but to those who love G.o.d and their neighbour supremely, it is a happy change."

"That is all true," said Anna. "My reason a.s.sents to it. But, in the act of dissolution--in that mortal strife, when the soul separates itself from the body--there is something from which my heart shrinks and trembles down fainting in my bosom. Ah! In the crossing of that bourne from which no traveller has returned to tell us of what is beyond, there is something that more than half appals me."

"There is much that takes away the fear you have mentioned," replied Marion. "It is the uncertain that causes us to tremble and shrink back. But, when we know what is before us, we prepare ourselves to meet it. Attendant upon every one who dies, says a certain writer, are two angels, who keep his mind entirely above the thought of death, and in the idea of eternal life. They remain with him through the whole process--protecting him from evil spirits--and receive him into the world of spirits after his soul has fully withdrawn itself from the interior of the body. The last idea, active in the mind of the person before death, is the first idea in his mind after death, when his consciousness of life is restored; and it is some time after this conscious life returns before he is aware that he is dead. Around him he sees objects similar to those seen in the natural world. There are houses and trees, streams of water and gardens. Men and women dressed in variously fashioned garments. They walk and converse together, as we do upon earth. When, at length, he is told that he has died, and is now in a world that is spiritual instead of natural--that the body in which he is, is a body formed of spiritual instead of natural substances, he is in a measure affected with surprise, and for the most part a pleasing surprise.

He wonders at the grossness of his previous ideas, which limited form and substances to material things; and now, unless he had been instructed during his life in the world, begins to comprehend the truth that man is a man from the spirit, not from the body."

Anna, who had been listening intently, drew a long breath, as Marion paused.

"Dead, and yet not know the fact!" said she, with an expression of wonder. "It seems incredible. And all this you fully believe?"

"Yes, Anna; as entirely as I believe in the existence of the sun in the firmament."

"If these doctrines can take away the fear of death, which so haunts the mind of even those who are striving to live pure lives, they are indeed a legacy of good to the world. Oh, Marion, how much I have suffered, ever since the days of my childhood, from this dreadful fear!"

"They do take away the fear of death," returned Marion; "because they remove the uncertainty which has heretofore gathered like a gloomy pall over the last hours of mortality. When the soul of lover or friend pa.s.sed from this world, it seemed to plunge into a dark profound, and there came not back an echo to tell of his fate. 'The bourne from which no traveller returns!' Oh! the painful eloquence of that single line. But, now, we who receive the doctrine of which I speak, can look beyond this bourne; and though the traveller returns not, yet we know something of how he fared on his entrance into the new country."

"Then we need not fear for you," said Anna, tenderly, "when you are called to pa.s.s this bourne?"

"No, sister," replied Marion, "I know in whom I have believed, and I feel sure that it will be well with me, so far as I have shunned what is evil and sought to do good. Do not think of me as sinking into some gloomy profound; or awakening from my sleep of death, startled, amazed, or shocked by the sudden transition. Loving angels will be my companions as I descend into the valley and the shadow of death; and I will fear no evil. Upon the other side I will be received among those who have gone before, and I will scarcely feel that there has been a change. A little while I will remain there, and then pa.s.s upward to my place in heaven."

The mother of Marion entered her room at this moment, and the conversation was suspended. But it was renewed again soon after, and the gentle-hearted, spiritual-minded girl continued to talk of the other world as one preparing for a journey talks about the new country into which he is about going, and of whose geography, and the manners and customs of whose people, he has made himself conversant from books.

Not long did she remain on this side of the dark valley, through which she was to pa.s.s. A few months wound up the story of her earthly life, and she went peacefully and confidently on her way to her eternal dwelling-place. It was a sweet, sad time, when the parting hour came, and the mother, brother, and dearly loved adopted sister, gathered around Marion's bed to see her die. That angels were present, each one felt; for the sphere of tranquillity that pervaded the hearts of all was the sphere of heaven.

"G.o.d is love," said Marion, a short time before she pa.s.sed away. She was holding the hand of her mother, and looking tenderly in her face. "How exquisite is my perception of this truth? It comes upon me with a power that subdues my spirit, yet fills it with ineffable peace. With what a wondrous love has he regarded us! I never had had so intense a perception of this as now."

Marion closed her eyes, and for some time lay silent, while a heavenly smile irradiated her features. Then looking up, she said, and as she spoke she took the hand of Anna and placed it within that of her mother--

"When I am gone, let the earthly love you bore me, mother, be added to that already felt for our dear Anna. Think of me as an angel, and of her as your child."

In spite of her effort to restrain them, tears gushed from the eyes of Mrs. Lee, and fell like rain over her cheeks. For a short time she bent to her dying one, and clasped her wildly to her bosom. But the calmness of a deeply laid trust in Providence was soon restored to her spirit, and she said, speaking of Anna--