“I got dreadfully lame. And the wind ran after me, and caught me again,
and took me in his great blue ghostly arms, and shook me about, and then
dropped me again to go on. But it was very hard to go on, and I couldn’t
stop; and there was no use in stopping, for the wind was everywhere in a
moment. Then suddenly I saw before me a great cataract, all in white,
falling flash from a precipice; and I thought with myself, ‘I will go into
the cataract, and it will beat my life out, and then the wind will not get
me any more.’ So I hastened towards it, but the wind caught me many times
before I got near it. At last I reached it, and threw myself down into the
basin it had hollowed out of the rocks. But as I was falling, something
caught me gently, and held me fast, and it was not the wind. I opened my
eyes, and behold! I was in my mother’s arms, and she was clasping me to
her breast; for what I had taken for a cataract falling into a gulf, was
only my mother, with her white grave-clothes floating all about her,
standing up in her grave, to look after me. ‘It was time you came home, my
darling,’ she said, and stooped down into her grave with me in her arms.
And oh! I was so happy; and her bosom was not cold, or her arms hard, and
she carried me just like a baby. And when she stooped down, then a door
opened somewhere in the grave, I could not find out where exactly—and
in a moment after, we were sitting together in a summer grove, with the
tree-tops steeped in sunshine, and waving about in a quiet loving wind—oh,
how different from the one that chased me home!—and we underneath in
the shadow of the trees. And then I said, ‘Mother, I’ve hurt my feet.’”
“Did you call her mother when you were a little girl?” interposed Harry.
“No,” answered Euphra. “I called her mamma, like other children; but in my
dreams I always call her mother.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said—‘Poor child!’—and held my feet to her bosom; and
after that, when I looked at them, the bleeding was all gone, and I was
not lame any more.”
Euphra, paused with a sigh.
“Oh, Harry! I do not like to be lame.”
“What more?” said Harry, intent only on the dream.
“Oh! then I was so happy, that I woke up directly.”
“What a pity! But if it should come true?”
“How could it come true, dear Harry?”
“Why, this world is sometimes cold, and the road is hard—you know
what I mean, Euphra.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I wish I could dream dreams like that! How clever you must be!”
“But you dream dreams, too, Harry. Tell me yours.”
“Oh, no, I never dream dreams; the dreams dream me,” answered Harry, with
a smile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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