"Am I not grand?—Like a queen!" exclaimed Shelah. "And are not these people kind to dress me like this! But oh, Mr. Hartley!" added the Lammikin, as she looked up with wondering admiration at Harold in his Oriental costume. "You are quite beautiful! You look like one of the angels in the book of Bible pictures! You want nothing but white wings! Do you think that they will grow?" asked the child.
The faintest of smiles rose to Harold's lips at the artless question. He thought, with a sigh, of the verse:
"'Oh, that I had wings like a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest!'"
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
A PROMISE.
"How beautiful the hour of early dawn,
When the first rays glance up the Eastern sky,
When the bright fingers of the fresh'ning morn
Draw back the veil of dark obscurity,
And give all Nature's beauties to the eye,
Her fairest scenes unfolding to the view;
The lark with buoyant pinion mounts on high,
And on the emerald lawn the pure soft dew
Sparkles with every beam which breaks the bright clouds
through.
"Thus on the night of ignorance and sin
The radiant morning of Conversion breaks,
A beam from heaven seems to shine within;
And, as the lark his earthly nest forsakes
And upward soars towards the source of light,—
From bonds of sin the soul enraptured breaks,
And—winged by Faith—springs on her upward flight
Till that clear day when Faith itself is lost in sight!"
A CHANGE, something like that described above, had come over the spirit of Ali, the Persian. The Amir had never been an enthusiastic follower of the False Prophet, and what Ali had heard and seen during his travels in various lands had extinguished any respect that he had felt for the Mahomedan faith. He had long suspected the Koran to be a tissue of lies palmed upon Arabian credulity by an impostor, a book unworthy of comparison with the Bible, which Ali had sometimes read in a cursory manner. But to leave hold of a false religion is a very different thing from grasping a true one. To extinguish smoky lamps is not a means of calling in the radiant day.
Ali, till he met a simple, true-hearted Christian, was an unbeliever as regarded the power of any faith to change the life. The Amir had been unfortunate in meeting with several nominal Christians, had shrewdly compared their conduct with their creed, and rejected the latter because inconsistent with the former. Ali had, as many do, found a refuge against the shafts of conscience in carping criticism of others; he was not worse, so he thought, than many who believe themselves certain of heaven through the merits of One whose example they do not follow, whose commands they do not obey.
But Ali's eyes were now opened; he looked on himself as stained with sin, and saw in Christianity, such as the Hartleys had embraced, the only means of being saved from eternal condemnation. No longer the Persian listened to Robin's recitals from Scripture in the spirit of a critic; for Ali was thirsting for the water of life, and could not pause to comment on the form of the cup which held it. Robin was delighted, but not surprised, to find that his prayers had been heard, for had he not pleaded with One whom Scripture describes as the Hearer of prayer?
It was at night, during the last halt made before Djauf would be reached, that Ali confessed to Robin his own desire to become a Christian.