"It is her class," said the pastor of Hope Chapel, as he stopped on the
landing. "They are all kinds. We never could hope to reach them; Jennie
can. They fetch her the papers given out in the Sunday-school, and
read to her what is printed under the pictures; and she tells them the
story of it. There is nothing Jennie doesn't know about the Bible."
The door opened upon a low-ceiled room, where the evening shades lay
deep. The red glow from the kitchen stove discovered a jam of children,
young girls mostly, perched on the table, the chairs, in one another's
laps, or squatting on the floor; in the midst of them, a little old
woman with heavily veiled face, and wan, wrinkled hands folded in her
lap. The singing ceased as we stepped across the threshold.
"Be welcome," piped a harsh voice with a singular note of cheerfulness
in it. "Whose step is that with you, pastor? I don't know it. He is
welcome in Jennie's house, whoever he be. Girls, make him to home." The
girls moved up to make room.
"Jennie has not seen since she was a child," said the clergyman,
gently; "but she knows a friend without it. Some day she shall see the
great Friend in his glory, and then she shall be Blind Jennie no more."
The little woman raised the veil from a face shockingly disfigured, and
touched the eyeless sockets. "Some day," she repeated, "Jennie shall
see. Not long now--not long!" Her pastor patted her hand. The silence
of the dark room was broken by Blind Jennie's voice, rising cracked and
quavering: "Alas! and did my Saviour bleed?" The shrill chorus burst
in:--
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
The light that falls from the windows of the Neighborhood Guild, in
Delancey Street, makes a white path across the asphalt pavement.
Within, there is mirth and laughter. The Tenth Ward Social Reform
Club is having its Christmas festival. Its members, poor mothers,
scrub-women,--the president is the janitress of a tenement near
by,--have brought their little ones, a few their husbands, to share
in the fun. One little girl has to be dragged up to the grab-bag. She
cries at the sight of Santa Claus. The baby has drawn a woolly horse.
He kisses the toy with a look of ecstatic bliss, and toddles away. At
the far end of the hall a game of blindman's-buff is starting up. The
aged grandmother, who has watched it with growing excitement, bids one
of the settlement workers hold her grandchild, that she may join in;
and she does join in, with all the pent-up hunger of fifty joyless
years. The worker, looking on, smiles; one has been reached. Thus is
the battle against the slum waged and won with the child's play.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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