Evenings at Donaldson Manor; Or, The Christmas GuestMcIntosh, Maria J. (Maria Jane)
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Evenings at Donaldson Manor; Or, The Christmas Guest
McIntosh, Maria J. (Maria Jane)
Christmas stories; Fiction
But he too was a man "born to trouble." He too must be initiated into
those "sacred mysteries of sorrow," through which the High-priest of his
profession had passed. In the succeeding ten years, three other children
opened their soft, loving eyes in his home, made its air musical with
their glad voices and ringing laughter, and just as he had learned to
listen for the pattering of their dimpled foot, and his heart had
throbbed joyously to their call, they were borne from his arms to the
grave, and the echoes which they had awakened in his soul were hushed
for ever. Still his Lucy and their first-born were spared, and as he
drew them closer to his heart he could "lift his trusting eyes" to Him
from whom his faith taught him no real evil could come to the loving
spirit. The shadow of earth had fallen on his heart, but the light of
heaven still beamed brightly there. Years passed with Mr. Sinclair in
that deep quiet of the soul which is "the sober certainty of waking
bliss." His labors were labors of love, and he was welcomed to repose by
all those charms which woman's taste and woman's tenderness can bring
clustering around the home of him to whom her heart is devoted. But a
darker trial than any he had yet known awaited him.
War is in our borders, and that quiet town in which Mr. Sinclair's life
has passed is destined to feel its heaviest curse. Its streets are
filled with soldiery. The dark canopy of smoke from which now and then a
lurid flame shoots upward, shows that their work is destruction, and
that they will do it well. Terrified women flit hither and thither,
mingling their shrieks in a wild and fiend-like concert with the crack
of musketry, the falling of houses, and the loud huzzas and fierce
outcries of excited men. At a distance from that quarter in which the
strife commenced, stands a simple village church, within whose shadow
many of those who had worshipped in its walls during the last half
century, have lain down to rest from the toils of life. No proud
mausoleum shuts the sunshine from those lowly graves. Drooping elms and
willows bend over them, and the whispering of their long pendent
branches, as the summer breeze sweeps them hither and thither, is the
only sound that breaks the stillness of that hallowed air. Near the
church, on the opposite side from this home of the dead, lies a garden,
whose roses and honey-suckles perfume the air, while its bowers of lilac
and laburnum, of myrtle and jessamine, almost shut from the view the
pretty cottage to which it belongs. All around, all within that cottage,
is silent. Have its inmates fled?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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