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Updated: June 6, 2025
Had my spirit been nearer to God during its unconscious wanderings, and brought back with it impressions of celestial glory never conceived before? I know not; but I know that a change had passed over it, and that I felt the reality of that eternity, which had seemed before a grand and ever-receding shadow.
There is the hungry-looking prospector, waiting with ill-disguised impatience till he can "cross the Range" and follow again, as he has done year after year, the exciting chase after the ever-receding mirage the visions of fabulous wealth always going to be, but never quite, attained.
They would have seen the colony they had planted in the wilderness, day by day strengthening its cords, enlarging its borders, and with firm tread advancing steadily to recognized place among the nations. They would have beheld the savage foe giving way before the inexorable advance of the hated 'pale face' sadly retreating toward the ever-receding western verge of civilization.
Then the antiphonal ceased; and together the voices of all within the place swelled out in the Gloria and the Amen, and seemed to pass away in ever-receding vibrations upon the desert, till it was lost in the comforting sunset. As the last note died away, a voice from beneath the palm-tree near the door, deeper than any that had come from within, said reverently: "Ameen- Ameen !"
Over this bed of shells and slime there moved and toiled a whole villageful of old women. Where the sea met the edges of the mud-flat the throng of women was thickest. The line of the ever-receding shore was marked by the shapes of countless bent figures. The heads of these stooping women were on a level with their feet, not one stood upright.
All must now see, what a few at first saw, that their claim to consideration rests upon their intrinsic merit only. But what that merit is, we fear will be disputed until the arrival of that ever-receding Shakespearian millenium when the editors shall no longer rage or the commentators imagine a vain thing.
Gone was her laughter, and vanished the merry exclamations and remarks, as she began to glean some idea of the width and breadth of the desert which was slowly engulfing her. Once or twice she had looked behind at the ever-receding town, with the sheen of the fresh water canal becoming fainter and fainter at each step, until it at last vanished into nothingness.
The common American attitude then and long afterwards indeed, up to a time well within living memory was that Indians were a kind of human vermin to be exterminated without mercy, unless, of course, more money was to be made out of them alive. The result was an endless struggle along the ever-receding frontier of the West.
But at least a first attempt will now be made to give some general idea of what such a history would contain in fuller detail: of the kayaks and canoes the Eskimos and Indians used before the white man came, and use to-day, in the ever-receding wilds; of the various small craft moved by oar and sail that slowly displaced the craft moved only by the paddle; of the sailing vessels proper, and how they plied along Canadian waterways, and out beyond, on all the Seven Seas; of the steamers, which, in their earlier pioneering days, shed so much forgotten lustre on Canadian enterprise; of those 'Cod-lands of North America' and other teeming fisheries which the far-seeing Lord Bacon rightly thought 'richer treasures than the mines of Mexico and of Peru'; of the Dominion's trade and government relations with the whole class of men who 'have their business in great waters'; and, finally, of that guardian Navy, without whose freely given care the 'water history' of Canada could never have been made at all.
Those days were no more. No vision of loot or luxury allured these. They saw only the yellow sand, the ever-receding oasis, the brackish, undrinkable water, the withered and fruitless date-tree, handfuls of dourha for their food by day, and the keen, sharp night to chill their half-dead bodies in a half-waking sleep.
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