“There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
Oh, the transporting, rapturous scene,
That dawns upon my sight;
Sweet fields arrayed in living green,
And rivers of delight.
There everlasting spring abides,
And never-withering flowers;
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This heavenly land from ours.
No chilling winds nor poisonous breath
Can reach that blessed shore;
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,
Are felt and feared no more.
O’er all those wide extended plains,
Shines one eternal day;
There Christ the Son forever reigns,
And scatters night away.
Filled with delight, my raptured soul
Can here no longer stay;
Though Jordan’s waves around me roll,
Fearless I launch away.”
John Travis had a tender, sympathetic voice. Just now he was more moved by emotion than he would have imagined. Dil turned her face away and picked up the tears with her fingers. It was too beautiful to cry about, for crying was associated with sorrow or pain. A great inarticulate desire thrilled through her, a blind, passionate longing for a better, higher life, as if she belonged somewhere else. And, like Bess, an impatience pervaded her to be gone at once.
“Oh, please do sing it again!” besought Bess in a transport, her face spiritualized to a seraphic beauty. “Did they sing like that in the Mission School, Dil?”
Dil shook her head in speechless ecstasy.
There was a knock, and then the door opened softly. It was Mrs. Murphy, with her sick baby in her arms.
“Ah, dear,” she began deprecatingly, with an odd little old country courtesy, “I heard the singing, an’ I said to poor old Mis’ Bolan, ‘That’s never the Salvation Army, for they do make such a hullabaloo; but it must be a Moody an’ Sankey man that I wunst haird, with the v’ice of an angel.’ An’ the pore craythur is a hankerin’ to get nearer. Will ye lit her come down, plaise, or will ye come up?”
John Travis flushed suddenly. Dil glanced at her visitor aghast. Some finer instinct questioned whether he were offended. But he smiled. If it would give a poor old woman a pleasure—
Dil was considering a critical point. She had learned to be wise in evading the fury of a half-drunken woman. There were many things she kept to herself. But Mrs. Murphy would talk him over. A Moody and Sankey man,—she had not a very clear idea; but if Mrs. Murphy knew, it might be wisdom to have some one here who would speak a good word for her if it should be needed.
“Ye can bring her down,” she answered, still looking at John Travis with rising color.
She simply stepped into the hall; but the old woman was half-way down-stairs, and needed no further summons.