A COLPORTEUR SKETCH.
“Isthis the place where a princess dwells,A favored daughter of the King of kings?Within their humble and contracted cells,Do heavenly spirits wave their guardian wings?”
“Isthis the place where a princess dwells,A favored daughter of the King of kings?Within their humble and contracted cells,Do heavenly spirits wave their guardian wings?”
“Isthis the place where a princess dwells,A favored daughter of the King of kings?Within their humble and contracted cells,Do heavenly spirits wave their guardian wings?”
“Isthis the place where a princess dwells,
A favored daughter of the King of kings?
Within their humble and contracted cells,
Do heavenly spirits wave their guardian wings?”
Stretchedon a bed of painful sickness there lay a woman in the last stages of consumption. Pale-faced poverty was an inmate of the hovel in which she dwelt. The broken panes of glass, the bare floor, the large cracks in the wall, the scanty covering, carefully thrown over the bed, all plainly bespoke the absence of the very necessaries of life. As I entered the door, my heart throbbed hurriedly when my eyes caught the destitution, the misery, the wretchedness, which surrounded me. Several children, from six to fourteen years of age, were in the room—some of them lying together on the floor, others seated on the remnant of a chair, while one little fellow, with matted hair and unwashed face, scowled at me from behind a door, as if he thought me an unwelcome visitor. The children had evidently been long neglected. No voice oflove had often fallen on their ears; no smile of affection had cheered their loneliness. Their lives had been made up with scenes of want and wretchedness. Their minds were like gardens all overgrown with noxious weeds. But few seeds of truth had been sown in their little hearts by the hand of kindness, and their little voices had never sung the sweet notes of “Happy Day,” or “The Sabbath-school.”
But let me not forget the quiet sufferer, who, with such calm composure, has all this time been lying in unbroken silence. Her days are almost numbered. Consumption, that fell destroyer of human hopes, has long been gnawing at her heart-strings. The cord of life is worn almost to its last thread. Her hollow cheek, her wasted form, her sunken, death-glazed eye, all tell me that the cold, clammy hand of Death is gradually chilling her life-blood. She breathes with difficulty, for her lungs are too far gone to perform their functions. Now and then a hacking cough seems as if it would rend her frail chest to pieces. In her feeble hand she holds a fan, with which she is endeavoring to cool her burning brow. Its faint fluttering is but the counterpart of the almost fainter fluttering of life, as it hovers round her heart.
I sat for several moments quietly gazing on the wan and wasted features of the poor sufferer, before I could summon the resolution to say a word. I finally broke the solemn silence which filled the desolate chamber, by telling her that I sympathized very deeply with her in the suffering through which she had to pass.
I then asked her, if God should see fit to call her away from earth, did she think she was prepared for so awful a change. She feebly whispered “Yes.”
“What is then to become of your unprotected children?”
“God will take care of them.”
“Do you think it right thatyoushould suffer so much, while others are in the enjoyment of countless blessings?”
“Perfectly.”
“Shall I read a portion of God’s Word, and pray with you?”
“If you please, sir.”
She reached her arm under the pillow and drew forth a Bible. Oh! how precious a thing it is, in the hour of death, to pillow one’s weary head on the precious promises of that blessed Book!
I slowly turned its sacred pages till I reachedthe fourteenth chapter of John—that chapter of blessed memory, which has soothed the troubled spirits of so many dying souls—after reading which, I knelt at her bedside and united with her in prayer. When I arose from my knees, her eyes were melted to tears, and a calm and holy peace rested on her pale and emaciated face.
Reader, it was a precious season to my own soul. God grant that the influences of that scene may never depart from me. My heart was cast down in humility, in penitence, as I remembered how often I had rebelled against God’s holy law. The unbidden tear was quietly trickling down my own cheek as I left that Bethel—that house of God.
Since writing the above, “The Poor Consumptive” has sweetly fallen asleep in Jesus.