‘My heart went down on its knees when I saw it. The divine spark is in
those children; it will be a moving power, helping them to struggle out
of their present environment into a wider, sunnier one—the one of the
real orchards. How fresh, how full of possibilities, is the world to the
people who can keep the child heart, and above all to the people who are
able to see orchards in window-boxes!’
_Another day_.—‘Lisa’s daily lesson is just finished. It was in
arithmetic, and I should have lost patience had it not been for her
musical achievements this morning. Edith played the airs of twenty or
thirty games, and without a word of help from us she associated the right
memory with each, and illustrated it with pantomime. In some cases, she
invented gestures of her own that showed deeper intuition than ours; and
when, last of all, the air of the Carrier Doves was played, a vision of
our Solitary must have come before her mind. Her lip trembling, she held
an imaginary letter in her fingers, and, brushing back the hair from her
forehead (his very gesture!), she passed her hand across her eyes, laid
the make-believe note in Rhoda’s apron, and slipped out of the door
without a word.
“‘Mr. Man! Mr. Man! It is Mr. Man when he couldn’t read his letter!”
cried the children. “Why doesn’t he come to see us any more, Miss
Rhoda?”
‘“He is doing some work for Miss Mary, I think,” answered Rhoda, with a
teasing look at me.
‘Lisa came back just then, and rubbed her cheek against my arm. “I went
to the corner,” she whispered, “but he wasn’t there; he is never there
now!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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