The Struggle.
"I KNOW all that you will say, Miriam," began Hamil, who was the first to break silence, looking down gloomily at the dusty grass before him. "You don't suppose that I've not often thought of my promise, and tried to keep it too. I had not so much as entered a public since I received your letter, till a few days ago, and then two of my comrades, jovial fellows, laughed me out of my resolutions, and got me to stand treat."
"And so the door was opened to the enemy," suggested Miriam, sadly; "you did not find it easy to close it again."
"I'll not deny it, I took more than was good for me, and I was near getting into a scrape at the time. But the worst of it is," continued Hamil more rapidly, kicking up the dust with the heel of his boot, "the worst of it is, that now the thirst and the longing is awakened again, and it seems as if I could not resist them! I do not want to disgrace myself, nor to vex you, Miriam, but I hardly am my own master in this. No one knows, but those who have felt it, the difficulties which beset a man who would get rid of a taste for spirits."
"Hamil, you are a soldier, a brave, noble soldier, one who never, in the field, was daunted or kept back by difficulties," said Miriam, pressing the arm of her brother. "Remember the fearful mountain passes through which you went with the army in Abyssinia. Of what long weary marches you have told me, when you had to struggle up heights, through stony, almost impassable defiles, till your breath failed, and your muscles were strained, and you felt that your limbs could scarcely support your weight. But difficulties did not turn you back then. You were the Queen's faithful soldier and were willing to serve her to the death."
"I could not have held back then," observed Hamil.
"And can you hold back now?" cried Miriam. "Oh! Hamil, remember what our curate said to us before our confirmation; you and I can never forget that sermon. He told us that we are all the enlisted soldiers or Christ, with His weapons to bear, and His battles to fight, and that for His sake we must all learn to 'endure hardness.' *
"Life is our one great campaign, sin is our great enemy, and the Lord Christ Himself the Captain of our salvation. If we follow Him we must expect to have to face some difficulties, if we follow Him we must fight. Oh dear brother, after hearing that sermon, do you not recollect how you and I went together to the wood in the hollow, and, under the great beech-tree, prayed that we might indeed be Christ's faithful soldiers and servants to the end of our lives?"
* 2 Tim. ii. 3.
Hamil heaved a deep sigh; sweet and holy was the remembrance of that day in their early youth, when he and his twin sister had resolved that, come what might, they would ever keep steady in the service of Him who had Himself triumphed over Satan, and who could make them more than conquerors by the strength of His Holy Spirit. The whole scene came back on the soldier's mind; the golden sunlight streaming through the boughs on the ground strewn with the brown fallen beech-mast, the sound of a stream gurgling near, the hum of a bright insect on the wing that had hovered around the twins where they sat on the mossy seat afforded by the gnarled roots of the tree.