Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
“Well, I’ll go on with my dream. I lay a long time till I got very
tired, and wanted to get up, O, so much! But still I lay, and although I
tried, I could not move hand or foot. At last I burst out crying. I was
ashamed of crying in my coffin, but I couldn’t bear it any longer.
I thought I was quite disgraced, for everybody was expected to be
perfectly quiet and patient down there. But the moment I began to cry,
I heard a sound. And when I listened it was the sound of spades and
pickaxes. It went on and on, and came nearer and nearer. And then--it
was so strange--I was dreadfully frightened at the idea of the light and
the wind, and of the people seeing me in my coffin and my night-dress,
and tried to persuade myself that it was somebody else they were digging
for, or that they were only going to lay another coffin over mine. And I
thought that if it was you, papa, I shouldn’t mind how long I lay there,
for I shouldn’t feel a bit lonely, even though we could not speak a word
to each other all the time. But the sounds came on, nearer and nearer,
and at last a pickaxe struck, with a blow that jarred me all through,
upon the lid of the coffin, right over my head.
“‘Here she is, poor thing!’ I heard a sweet voice say.
“‘I’m so glad we’ve found her,’ said another voice.
“‘She couldn’t bear it any longer,’ said a third more pitiful voice than
either of the others. ‘I heard her first,’ it went on. ‘I was away up in
Orion, when I thought I heard a woman crying that oughtn’t to be crying.
And I stopped and listened. And I heard her again. Then I knew that it
was one of the buried ones, and that she had been buried long enough,
and was ready for the resurrection. So as any business can wait except
that, I flew here and there till I fell in with the rest of you.’
“I think, papa, that this must have been because of what you were
saying the other evening about the mysticism of St. Paul; that while he
defended with all his might the actual resurrection of Christ and the
resurrection of those he came to save, he used it as meaning something
more yet, as a symbol for our coming out of the death of sin into the
life of truth. Isn’t that right, papa?”
“Yes, my dear; I believe so. But I want to hear your dream first, and
then your way of accounting for it.”
“There isn’t much more of it now.”
“There must be the best of it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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