United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"It was me mother's bed, so it was she looked very well when she was laid out on it," she added thoughtfully. "Very well, indeed, she looked! I always thought that Dan an' meself 'ud be waked in that bed, too. Well, well, the Lord knows best, doesn't he, yer reverence? But I'd think very bad of lettin' that bed out o' this to go anywhere on'y to yer reverence's house."
The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that outside his windows the world was white with dawn. He waked from his dream at the homely sound.
A new and lofty emotion, which pervaded his whole being, had waked within him and was but slightly dimmed, though he had experienced a sorrow bitter enough to darken the light of any other man's existence. Naught could surpass the noble objects to which he intended to devote his blood and life his God and his people.
Those, at least, who do at any time SLEEP WITHOUT DREAMING, can never be convinced that their thoughts are sometimes for four hours busy without their knowing of it; and if they are taken in the very act, waked in the middle of that sleeping contemplation, can give no manner of account of it. That men dream without remembering it, in vain urged.
Presently she went to hear how it fared with her other mother, her normal one. The cross purposes of her relations to the two old sisters were an entanglement of perplexities. Granny Marrable, asleep when Ruth looked stealthily in at her, was waked by a creak with which the door just contrived to disappoint hopes of a noiseless escape. She called after her: "Yes, who's that?"
It seemed a dream that she was walking through the grey light, and the empty streets of the little town; everything looked and felt so wild and strange. If it was a dream, she was soon waked out of it.
"There, Millie," resumed her mother, laughing, "you have a woman's reason for your feelings you don't like him, and that is the end of it. You must admit, however, that he has improved wonderfully. I never saw a young fellow so changed, so thoroughly waked up. He has sense, too, in little things. One would think from his dress he had been born and bred in the city.
"The poor creatures may never quit the temple excepting for a procession, or before sunrise. It sounded too delightful when she said that she was always so horribly tired, and so glad to go to sleep again after she was waked, and had to go out at once just when it is coldest, in the twilight before sunrise. Then she has to draw water from a cistern called the Well of the Sun."
And how delightful it was in the wood; how pleasant the rowing on the water, during which, when the joy of existence was at its height, the saddest songs were sung! Oh, I could relate a hundred things of those birthdays in the country, but I have completely forgotten how we got home. I only know that we waked the next morning full of happy recollections.
Now go on, and don't let me hear from you again till you can come and tell me you've waked up, you poor, pitiful, dandelion-pickin' SLEEP-WALKER!" Bibbs gave him a queer look. There was something like reproach in it, for once; but there was more than that he seemed to be startled by his father's last word.
Word Of The Day