I set myself to my task, as has been my wont always, and soon my mother and my friend, Anna Gordon, who were fanning me with big “palm-leaves,” became grotesque and then ridiculous, and I remember saying (or at least I remember that I once [66] ]remembered), “You are a couple of enormous crickets standing on your hind legs, and you have each a spear of dry grass, and you look as if you were paralyzed; and you wave your withered spears of grass, and you call that fanning a poor woman who is suffocating before your eyes.” I labored with them, entreated them, and dealt with them in great plainness—so much so that my mother could not bear to hear me talk in such a foolish fashion, and quietly withdrew to her own room, closed the door, and sat down to possess her soul in patience until the operation should be over.
Then the scene changed, and as they put on the splints pain was involved, and I heard those about me laughing in the most unfeeling manner while I murmured: “She always believed in humanity—she always said she did and would; and she has lived in this town thirty years, and they are hurting her—they are hurting her dreadfully; and if they keep on she will lose her faith in human nature, [67] ]and if she should it will be the greatest calamity that can happen to a human being.”
Now the scene changed once more—I was in the starry heavens, and said to the young friends who had come in and stood beside me: “Here are stars as thick as apples on a bough, and if you are good you shall each have one. And, Anna, because you are good, and always have been, you shall be given a whole solar system to manage just as you like. The Heavenly Father has no end of them; He tosses them out of His hand as a boy does marbles; He spins them like a cocoon; He has just as many after He has given them away as He had before He began.”
Then there settled down upon me the most vivid and pervading sense of the love of God that I have ever known. I can give no adequate conception of it, and what I said, as my comrades repeated it to me, was something after this order:
“We are like blood-drops floating through [68] ]the great heart of our Heavenly Father. We are infinitely safe, and cared for as tenderly as a baby in its mother’s arms. No harm can come anywhere near us; what we call harm will turn out to be the very best and kindest way of leading us to be our best selves. There is no terror in the universe, for God is always at the center of everything. He is love, as we read in the good book, and He has but one wish—that we should love one another; in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”
Little by little, freeing my mind of all sorts of queer notions, I came back out of the only experience of the kind that I have ever known; but I must say that had I not learned the great evils that result from using anesthetics I should have wished to try ether again, just for the ethical and spiritual help that came to me. It let me out into a new world, greater, more mellow, more godlike, and it did me no harm at all.
During the time my arm was in a sling I [69] ]“sat about”—something not easy to do for one of active mind and life. I learned to write with my left hand—for this was before the happy days of the many stenographers—and my hieroglyphics went out to all the leading temperance women of this country. One morning the bell, distant and musical, tolled in the steeple of the university. We knew it meant that General Grant was dead, for the newspapers and despatches of the previous evening had prepared us. Somehow a deep chord in my soul vibrated to the tone of the bell—a chord of patriotism—and I went away to the vine-covered piazza, where I was wont to sit, and in twenty minutes (which fact is my apology for their limping feet) wrote out my heart in the following lines. They had at least the merit of sincere devotion, and were telephoned to Chicago, eleven miles away, by Anna Gordon, and appearing in the daily Inter-Ocean were read at their breakfast-tables by many other patriots next morning. I do not know when anything has [70] ]given me more real pleasure than to be told that a stalwart soldier belonging to the Grand Army of the Republic read my crude but heartfelt lines aloud to his wife and daughter, and at the close brushed away a manly tear.
GRANT IS DEAD.
On Hearing the University Bell at Evanston, Ill., Toll for
the Death of General Grant at Nine O’clock A.M.,
July 23, 1885.
Toll, bells, from every steeple,