Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of CreationPridham, Caroline
Religion
Twilight and Dawn; Or, Simple Talks on the Six Days of Creation
Pridham, Caroline
Creation -- Juvenile literature
You remember the story about the boy who was brought up in a mine. Now I
want to tell you about a little girl who did not live in a coal-mine, but
was often taken there by her father. Her mother had died when she was a
baby, and as she grew older her father was her constant friend, and loved
his little daughter so much that he liked to have her always near him. And
so, though she was only seven years old when he came to work in this mine,
he very often took her with him in the cage, and she had leave to stay
underground until his work was done and he could take her home again.
Children can always find ways of amusing themselves, and this child had a
happy time in her strange nursery, and many a merry game she played among
the coal. As she grew older her father allowed her to carry a lantern, as
the miners did, and she would go fearlessly through the dark passages by
herself, until she knew all their windings as well as you know the paths in
your father's garden.
But all at once this happy life came to an end: three years had passed, and
she was just ten years old, when a great sorrow came to this child. As her
dear father was going down the shaft one morning the chain broke, and the
cage fell to the bottom of the mine. When his mates ran to the spot, they
knew at once that he had been killed by that terrible fall, and slowly and
sadly they took up his crushed and wounded body and carried it home. The
first thing that the dear little daughter knew about the accident which had
made her an orphan child, was when she saw the men, who had worked with her
father, coming towards his cottage with their sad burden.
She at once ran to meet them, asking when father would be home; but the
sight of their faces soon told her, young as she was, all the truth. When
first she understood what had happened she cried with a bitter cry, for her
father was all she had in the world. Then, while the rough miners, amid
their tears, tried to comfort her, she suddenly knelt down on the grass
where they had laid the body and prayed as her dear father had taught her
to pray.
[Illustration: THE MINER'S LITTLE DAUGHTER.]
What a touching thing it must have been to see the child kneeling there,
and to hear her, in her great grief, say three times over, "Thy will be
done!"
One of the miners took her to his home, and they all tried to comfort her.
At first it seemed as if she could not recover from the shock, and they
feared she would die of grief; but by-and-by she began to try to help
the kind woman--who was like a mother to her--in the care of her little
children, and at last she got courage to go down into the mine again, to
the very place where her poor father had been killed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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