Home > Authors Index > Browse all available works of Amelia Edith Barr > Text of Story Of Mary Neil
A short story by Amelia Edith Barr |
||
The Story Of Mary Neil |
||
________________________________________________
Title: The Story Of Mary Neil Author: Amelia Edith Barr [More Titles by Barr] Poverty has not only many learned disciples, but also many hidden saints and martyrs. There are humble tenements that are tabernacles, and desolate, wretched rooms that are the quarries of the Almighty--where with toil and weariness and suffering the souls He loves are being prepared for the heavenly temple. This is the light that relieves the deep shadow of that awful cloud of poverty which ever hangs over this rich and prosperous city. I have been within that cloud, wet with its rain of tears, chilled with its gloomy darkness, "made free" of its innermost recesses; therefore I speak with authority when I say that even here a little child may walk and not stumble, if Jesus lead the way or hold the hand. Nay, but children walk where strong men fall down, and young maidens enter the kingdom while yet their parents are stumbling where no light from the Golden City and "the Land very far off" reaches them. Last winter I became very much interested in such a case. I was going to write "Poor Mary Neil!" but that would have been the strangest misnomer. Happy Mary Neil! rises impetuously from my heart to contradict my pen. And yet when I first became acquainted with her condition, she was "poor" in every bitter sense of the word. A drunkard's eldest daughter, "the child of misery baptized with tears," what had her seventeen years been but sad and evil ones? Cold and hunger, cares and labors far beyond her strength sowed the seeds of early death. For two years she struggled amid such suffering as dying lungs entail to help her mother and younger brothers and sisters, but at last she was compelled to make her bed amid sorrow and suffering which she could no longer assuage by her helpful hands and gentle words. Her religious education had not been quite neglected, and she dimly comprehended that through the narrow valley which lay between Time and Eternity she would need a surer and more infallible guide than her own sadly precocious intellect. Then God sent her just the help she needed--a tender, pitiful, hopeful woman full of the love of Jesus. Souls ripen quickly in the atmosphere of the Border Land, and very soon Mary had learned how to walk without fearing any evil. Certain passages of Scripture burned with a supernatural glory, and made the darkness light; and there were also a few hymns which struck the finest chords in her heart, and
"Is it very dark, Mary dear?" her friend said one morning, the last for her on earth. "Too dark to see," she whispered, "but I can go on if Christ will hold my hand." After this a great solemnity shaded her face; she lost all consciousness of this world. The frail, shadowy little body lay gray and passive, while that greatest of all struggles was going on--the struggle of the Eternal out of Time; but her lips moved incessantly, and occasionally some speech of earth told the anxious watchers how hard the conflict was. For instance, toward sundown she said in a voice strangely solemn and anxious:
"Both hands, dear Lord, both hands.'"Don't doubt but she got them; their mighty strength lifted her over the dark river almost dry shod.
[The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |