“Then we had better go forward to Texas.”
“It seems the only road open to us.”
So Robert took passage for us on The Lone Star, bound for Galveston, and I had a singular failure of heart and hope. I had longed so to go to Boston, but that prayer had fallen from out my prayers and had come to nothing. Chicago had been our first station on a wrong road; all it promised had turned to failure, and it had taken the hand of God to lift us out of the ruth and ruin we met in places to which we were not sent. Yellow fever and cholera had driven us down that dreary, steaming, terrible river. Would Texas indeed give a future to our mistaken past? Then my eyes fell upon my children playing with such careless sweet content in the cool, dusky room. They had no fear as to where their father and I were going to take them. They believed in our love and wisdom. Would God be less kind to us than we were to them? Impossible! Then why not give Him the same child-like confidence and affection? For, if I did not know where we were going, I did know
“We could not drift,
Beyond God’s love and care.”
That surely was sufficient.
CHAPTER XII
A PLEASANT JOURNEY
“... all that is most beauteous imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams