Selections from My Scrap Book.
Many of the selections given in this chapter were written by prisoners and given me by them. The others may not all be new to the reader, but I have thought them of sufficient value to thus preserve, as they may be reread with profit, and no doubt may be read here by many who have not seen them elsewhere. Such will surely feel the time it takes to read them well spent.
Many of the songs I have sung are not in print here, as they are familiar or may be found in popular books; others I thought might be copyrighted and I do not know the owner, etc. I have not meant to use any copyright selections without procuring the right to do so, but if through mistake any have been used I shall be glad to make due requital.
THE AUTHOR OF FLOWER MISSION DAY.
I once visited this sister, a saint, meekly lying upon her bed, and when I asked if she would like for Jesus to heal her, she said God could use her better in that condition.
E. R. W.
Jennie Cassady was born in Louisville, Kentucky, June 9, 1840. She came to earth through no royal line of ancestry. No booming cannon and flying flags proclaimed the birth of a princess. No jeweled hand beckoned her to a place of rank and title. Nothing in babyhood or girlhood distinguished her above what is visible in ten thousand homes to-day. But as she stepped over the threshold into womanhood, there fell upon her a great calamity—a cruel accident made her a cripple and an invalid for life. But in her afflictions she arose to a sublimity and sweetness of soul that has challenged the admiration of two continents. And out of the awful shadows that fell upon her she has gathered up the sunbeams of God's smiles and scattered them into the dark places of earth. Out of that one little darkened room in Kentucky there has gone forth an inspiration that has fired the heart of heroic Christian womanhood. And out of the darkness that smote her pathway leaped the lances of light that pierces the gloom of prison walls. A gleam from that radiant life touches the poet's fancy, and gives us these beautiful lines.
J. M. CROCKER,
Prison Chaplain.
FLOWER DAY AT THE PRISON.
Composed and read by F. L. Platt at the Iowa State Prison at Anamosa, June 9th, 1894.
In a cottage in Kentucky, In the years that have gone by, Was a woman, oh, so lonely, She'd been given up to die.