Arizona -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Religious fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
When Margaret was a very little girl her father and mother had left her
alone for an hour with a stranger while they went out to make a call in
a strange city through which they were passing on a summer trip. The
stranger was kind, and gave to the child a large green box of bits of
old black lace and purple ribbons to play with, but she turned
sorrowfully from the somber array of finery, which was the only thing in
the way of a plaything the woman had at hand, and stood looking drearily
out of the window on the strange, new town, a feeling of utter
loneliness upon her. Her little heart was almost choked with the
awfulness of the thought that she was a human atom drifted apart from
every other atom she had ever known, that she had a personality and a
responsibility of her own, and that she must face this thought of
herself and her aloneness for evermore. It was the child's first
realization that she was a separate being apart from her father and
mother, and she was almost consumed with the terror of it.
As she rose now from her bed on the ground and looked out across that
vast waste, in which the only other living creature was that sinister,
watching eagle, the same feeling returned to her and made her tremble
like the little child who had turned from her box of ancient finery to
realize her own little self and its terrible aloneness.
For an instant even her realization of God, which had from early
childhood been present with her, seemed to have departed. She could not
grasp anything save the vast empty silence that loomed about her so
awfully. She was alone, and about as far from anywhere or anything as
she could possibly be in the State of Arizona. Would she ever get back
to human habitations? Would her friends ever be able to find her?
Then her heart flew back to its habitual refuge, and she spoke aloud and
said, "God is here!" and the thought seemed to comfort her. She looked
about once more on the bright waste, and now it did not seem so dreary.
"God is here!" she repeated, and tried to realize that this was a part
of His habitation. She could not be lost where God was. He knew the way
out. She had only to trust. So she dropped upon her knees in the sand
and prayed for trust and courage.
When she rose again she walked steadily to a height a little above the
camp-fire, and, shading her eyes, looked carefully in every direction.
No, there was not a sign of her recent companions. They must have stolen
away in the night quite soon after she fell asleep, and have gone fast
and far, so that they were now beyond the reach of her eyes, and not
anywhere was there sign of living thing, save that eagle still sweeping
in great curves and poising again above the distant mesa.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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