As ivy clingeth round a ruin,
Still green within the darkest cleft,
The human soul in its undoing
Has still some lingering virtue left.
Julia slept little during the night. The state of nervous terror in which she had been thrown, the shrinking dread which made her quail and tremble at the approach of her fellow prisoners—even the rude kindness of the strange being who took a sort of tiger-like interest in her—frightened sleep from her eyes.
A cell had been arranged for her, and the woman, who still shielded her from the other prisoners, much as a wild beast might protect her young, consented that the infant boy should be her companion through the night. This was a great comfort to the poor girl. To her belief there was protection in the sleeping innocence of the child, who lay with his delicately veined temples pressing that coarse prison pillow, softly as if it had been fragrant with rose-leaves.
Julia could not sleep, but it was pleasant in her sad wakefulness to feel the sweet breath of this child floating over her face, and his soft arms clinging to her neck. To her poetic imagination it seemed as if a cherub from heaven had been left to cheer her in the darkness. Sometimes she would start and listen, or cringe breathlessly down to her pretty companion, for strange, fierce voices occasionally broke from some of the cells on either side—smothered sounds as of spirits chained in torment—wailing and wild shouts of laughter; for with some of those wretched inmates, memory grew sharp in the midnight of a prison, and others dreamed as they had lived—shouting fiercely in the sleep which was not rest, but the dregs of lingering inebriation.
Of the mind and heart of this young girl, we have said but little. The few simple acts of her life have been allowed to speak for her extreme youth; the utter isolation of her life, even more than her youth, would, in ordinary characters, have kept her still ignorant and uninformed. But Julia was not an ordinary character; there was depth, earnestness, and that extreme simplicity in her nature which goes to make up the beauty and strength of womanhood. Suffering had made her precocious, nothing more—it sent thought hand in hand with feeling. It threw her forward in life some three or four years. Gratitude, so early and so deeply enkindled in her young heart, foreshadowed the intensity of affection, nay, of passion, when it should once be aroused.
In this country, the most abject poverty need not preclude the craving mind from its natural aliment, books. Julia had read more and thought more than half the girls of her age in the very highest walks of life. Her first love of poetry was drawn from the most beautiful of all sources, the Bible. Her grandfather was a good reader, and possessed no small degree of natural eloquence. Gushes of poetry, of solemn, sweet feeling were constantly breaking through the prayers which she had listened to every night and morning of her life; the very sublimity of his faith, the simple trust which never forsook him in the goodness of his Creator—the cheerful humility of his entire character, all this had aroused sympathetic emotions in his grandchild's heart. It is the good alone who thoroughly feel how keen and sweet intellectual joys may become. When we water the blossoms of a strong mind with dew from the fountains of a good heart, the whole being is harmonious, and the rarest joys of existence are secured.
But though the Bible contains the safest and most beautiful groundwork of all literature, history, biography, ethics, poetry, and even that pure fiction, which shadows forth truth in the parables, the mind that has first tasted thought there, will crave other sources of knowledge. A few old volumes, so shabby that the pawnbrokers refused loans upon them, and the second-hand book-stalls rejected them at any price, still remained in her basement home. These she had read with the keen relish of a mind hungry for knowledge. Then old Mrs. Gray had a few books at her farm-house. She had never read them herself, good soul, and whenever the beauties of "Paradise Lost," were mentioned, had only a vague professional idea that our first parents had been driven forth from a remarkably fine vegetable and fruit garden just before the harvest season. Still she had great respect for the man who could mourn so great a loss in verse, and delighted in lending the volumes to her young friend whenever she had time to read.