Azalea: The Story of a Little Girl in the Blue Ridge MountainsPeattie, Elia Wilkinson
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Azalea: The Story of a Little Girl in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Peattie, Elia Wilkinson
Blue Ridge Mountains -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; North Carolina -- Juvenile fiction
And then, just as they were on the point of being bored again, the storm
cleared. Above them the deep blue sky shone through the fleecy whiteness
of the clouds, and beneath them torn fragments of cloud swam along like
floating islands over the purple valley. The sunset came in rose and
gold, and in the east a proud young moon, bright as a happy bride, swam
up into the heavens.
The McBirneys, silent and happy, cloaked against the dampness, sat at
“Outlook Point” and looked about them at the beautiful world.
“This is as good as church, to my way of thinking,” remarked Thomas
McBirney. “If you can’t worship the Almighty when you see a thing like
this, then there ain’t no manner of worship in you.”
“What’s that, Thomas? Singing?” asked his wife.
Something sweet and clear troubled the silence, and as the four harkened
it swelled.
“Singing!” decided Thomas. “Who can it be?”
They listened.
“I know,” cried Azalea gayly. “It’s the Carsons! Oh, ma, it’s Carin and
her father and mother.”
Something gripped Mary McBirney’s loving, jealous heart. She knew why
they were coming. She had asked them to come for this very thing, but
when the rain had set in, it had seemed like an answer to her secret
prayers—those prayers which she would not admit to herself that she
prayed, and which were no more than her “heart’s sincere desire.”
The horses drew nearer; the words of the song could be heard.
“Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh—”
The three voices, softly blended, sang the familiar lines to the slow
motion of their horses.
Azalea ran to the edge of the “Outlook” and sent her clear voice, rested
and refreshed from the strain it had undergone in the days of her
enforced singing of noisy songs, ringing down the mountain side.
“Shadows of the evening,
Steal across the sky.”
The tightness at Ma McBirney’s heart increased. How like her Azalea was
to these others—like them in voice and manner, and unafraid of them!
They had heard her, for Mr. Carson interrupted himself to call out to
her. Then the song went on, and there were four singing it.
“Jesus give the weary
Calm and sweet repose;
With Thy tenderest blessing,
May our eyelids close.”
Now the sounds grew fainter as the windings of the road took them away;
then they swelled again, as the horses returned on the winding road. But
Azalea sang on, delighting in the song her mother had taught her—the song
that had comforted her when she had grown sick at heart at all the silly
things she had been obliged to sing when she was “the show girl.”
“Grant to little children,
Visions bright of Thee;
Guard the sailors tossing
On the deep, blue sea.”
“They are here,” said Ma McBirney in so solemn a voice that Jim and
Azalea stared at her, wondering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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