Gracie's affliction had proved a blessing to her. Our greatest trials are often blessings in disguise. In Gracie's case, God had sent His Holy Spirit to soften the little girl's naturally self-willed and passionate nature; and the once peevish, ill-tempered child became gentle and patient under its blessed influence. The greatest pleasure little Grace knew was going to the Sunday-school, where her gentle ways and her loving disposition made her a great favourite with her teacher. She had a sweet voice, and would sit in the summer time, for hours together, by the banks of the stream, at the end of the garden, singing over the hymns she had learned at school, and repeating over to herself what texts of Scripture she could remember. The memory of blind persons is generally more retentive than that of other people; God in His great mercy seeming to make up to them in this way for the loss of sight.
No one could look at Little Gracie and fail to see that her blindness was to her a great mercy. Living in a little world of her own, shut out from seeing the unkind looks, the angry gestures, which so embittered the lives of all the other members of her family, she was the only happy inmate of the mill cottage. Her one real sorrow was the dislike which her father ever seemed to feel towards her since the time of the accident. Whether or not it was that Gracie's sightless eyes seemed a constant reproach to him for his conduct, and that her presence continually reminded him that the fearful lesson had been thrown away upon him, it is certain that he scarcely ever addressed a kindly word to her, and would coldly repel any little affectionate advances on her part. John Hardy little knew the depth of love in his child's heart which he thus wantonly rejected, and dreamed not that the day would come when he would have given worlds to have possessed it; but it was too late.
"If father would only love me!" Gracie would say to her mother.
And then, Mrs. Hardy, who was gentle towards her blind child, though harsh and cold to everybody else, would whisper words of comfort, always ending with, "Some day he will, Gracie."
At one time the child had tried by numberless little endearing ways to win her father's love. She would creep gently up to him as he sat by the fire in the winter having his supper, and once, but only once, she had ventured to put her hand in his. But the little hand had been thrust from him with angry words, and the child had crept sorrowfully to her bed. After that she never went near her father, if she could help it; and the sound of his coming footsteps, or of his voice, was the signal for her to retreat. In summer she would hide herself in the garden; in winter, in the little room where she and her sister slept.
One of Walter White's first efforts at carpentering on his own account had been to erect a little rustic seat for Gracie, under an old elm tree which grew near the bunks of the stream at the bottom of her father's garden.
There, in the summer time, the blind child would pass hours together, listening to the song of the birds, the hum of the insects, the rustling of the leaves stirred by the passing breeze, and the pleasant rushing sound of the mill-stream. At such times the child's thoughts would wander far away into the distant future—to that blessed day when, as her Bible told her, "the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." (Isa. xxxv. 5-6, 10).
Gracie knew every word of the chapter whence these verses are taken; she had learned it at the Sunday-school, and was never tired of repeating it to herself.
"It sends away all my troubles," she would say to Walter, who was the only one to whom she ever talked on the subject; none of her own family would have understood her.
Even her mother, kind though she was to the blind child, could not enter into her feelings on religious subjects. Gracie's "precious Bible" was not yet "precious" to her mother. It is only through God's grace that the Bible can ever be to any one what it was to little blind Gracie,—