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I made a rapid retreat down the ladder; and was only reassured by hearing the object of my terror calling after me, and recognizing his voice as that of a harmless old pilgrim whom I had known before. Our farm-house was situated in a lonely valley, half surrounded with woods, with no neighbors in sight.
Stimulated by the present of a Tobe, he composed a song in honor of the pilgrim: I will offer a literal translation of the exordium, though sentient of the fact that modesty shrinks from such quotations. "Formerly, my sire and self held ourselves songsters: Only to day, however, I really begin to sing.
The steps of the pilgrim now were more firm, for trust was begotten within her, and the light of hope gleamed on her brow as it will at last upon us all, when the waters have gushed from the bare rocks which lie in the pathways of our lives. At last we shall learn that our Father, the great Guide, leads us where flow living waters, and that he never forsakes us in time of need.
She might belong to any age, like an idyl of Theocritus; but while she always understood Mrs. Fosdick, that entertaining pilgrim could not always understand Mrs. Todd. That very first evening my friends plunged into a borderless sea of reminiscences and personal news. Mrs.
"Poor little chap! So you are a pilgrim like the rest of us. I wish we did not have to go on and on, dearest!" she exclaimed passionately, "why cannot we stand still and enjoy?" "It would grow monotonous, little Vad. Progress is the law of all being, and seventy years of life is generally enough for the majority. You would not like to live to be an old lady of two hundred and fifty?
And she perceived that the village folk were a simple folk, not learned and wise like those she had left; and that though they lived within sight of the great city, and showed every stranger the beautiful view of it, and the glory of its towers, yet few among them had travelled there; for they were so content with their fields, and their river, and the shade of their trees, and the birds singing, and their simple life, that they wanted no change; though it pleased them to receive the little Pilgrim, and they brought her into their villages rejoicing, and called every one to see her.
But for this fire it might have been possible for the modern pilgrim to see the building as it appeared during the stirring events just recounted; for, notwithstanding the wealth of the monastery of Christ Church, it would have probably been thought desirable to retain the fabric as much as possible as it appeared in Becket's time.
They afterward made a present of it to the poet, when he came to the estate, and the Pilgrim Oak is likely to continue a rural gathering place for many coming generations. From this magnificent and time-honored tree we continued on our sylvan research, in quest of another oak, of more ancient date and less flourishing condition.
As a pilgrim, who goes along a path where he never journeyed before, may believe every house that he sees in the distance to be his inn, and, not finding it to be so, may direct his belief to the next, and so travel on from house to house until he reach the inn, even so our Soul, as soon as it enters the untrodden path of this life, directs its eyes to its supreme good, the sum of its day's travel to good; and therefore whatever thing it sees which seems to have in itself some goodness, it thinks to be the supreme good.
A few moments more, and on a baby brow had fallen a few drops of water, and the little pilgrim of a new life had been called Mara in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the minister slowly repeating thereafter those beautiful words of Holy Writ, "A father of the fatherless is God in his holy habitation," as if the baptism of that bereaved one had been a solemn adoption into the infinite heart of the Lord.
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