Dawn of the Morning

by Grace Livingston Hill

By noon the johnny-cake and milk were dreams of the past, and she was exceedingly hungry, yet she had not come to a place where she cared to ask for dinner. Every farm-house she came to seemed to have plenty of farmhands about, coming in to their dinner, and she dreaded their eyes upon her. So she sat down under a tree by the roadside and ate her fat, sugary doughnuts, rested a few minutes, and plodded on.

The afternoon was more wearisome. Her slippers hurt her feet, and she had to stop often to rest. About five o'clock she came to a neat-looking inn by the roadside, where a decent woman sat knitting by the door, and Dawn decided to sacrifice something from her small store of money and stop overnight.

The woman eyed her curiously when she asked for a room and supper. Not many pilgrims so young or so beautiful passed her way unattended. Dawn explained that she was on her way to another town, to look for something to do.

"I suppose you're expecting to teach school," said the woman disapprovingly. "They all do nowadays, when they better be home, helping their mothers make bread and pies."

"My mother is dead," said Dawn quietly, "and I must earn my own living now."

The woman was silenced, and gave the young traveller a pleasant little whitewashed room, where she slept soundly. But an idea had come to her. A teacher! Of course, she could be a teacher. Had she not led her classes, and always been successful in showing the girls at school how to do their sums? She would enjoy playing the part of Friend Ruth, and putting a class through its paces. It quite interested her to think how she would do it. But how would she get her school? Should she go to New York and try, or begin in a country one first?

This thought interested her all through the day, which was Saturday, and kept away the undertone of consciousness of a deep loss. But once, toward evening, she passed a shiny new carryall in which rode a young man and a girl, and a sharp pang shot through her heart as it brought back vividly to her memory the beautiful day which she and Charles had spent together. And then her mind went back to the first time she had seen him, that day when she was standing on the hilltop with, her small audience before her, and had looked up and seen the shining of his eyes. It came to her then that she had a certain right of possession in him, as if that day had given her to him and him to her in a bond that could never be broken, no matter how far they might be separated. Quiet joy settled down upon her with the thought that, whatever might come, whether she ever saw him again or not, she was his wife, and nobody, nobody could ever take the thought of it from her.

The sun was setting, and evening bells were ringing in the spire of a little white church, as she came into a small village nestled at the foot of a circle of hills. It reminded her that the next day was the Sabbath.

That day had no sweet association for her since her mother's death, but, though she had been only a little child, she could remember walking by her mother's side to church, with her little starched skirts swinging, and her mitted hands folded demurely over her pocket handkerchief, while the bells rang a cheery call to prayer. There had been no bells on the meeting-house to which the scholars of Friend Ruth's school were taken every First Day, and nothing about the service to remind her of the church where she had sat by her mother's side in the high-backed pew and heard the hymns lined out, trying to follow the singing of the congregation with her wee sweet voice; but now the bells harked back over the years and brought an aching memory of her almost forgotten little girlhood. A sudden longing to go to church as she used to do came over her, and she decided to find a place in the village to stay over Sunday and go to service in the little white-spired church. Besides, it was against the law in those days for any one to travel unnecessarily on the Sabbath day. Dawn never thought of doing so, any more than she would have contemplated the possibility of stealing.

It chanced that she arrived at the village tavern about the same time as the stage-coach from the opposite direction, and no one noticed that she had not come on the stage, for there were a number of travellers who stopped off here for the Sabbath. Seeing them descending from the coach, she went in haste to the landlady and begged that she might have a tiny room to herself. She was a little frightened at the thought of paying a whole dollar out of her small hoard for the lodging and her meals until after breakfast Monday morning, but she shut her eyes to the thought of it and took the room. It was only a tiny one over a shed that was given her, but everything was clean and sweet, and the supper smells came richly up through the open window to her hungry senses. On the whole, she was quite content when she lay down to rest in her own little room that night and dreamed of church-bells, and weddings, and sweet fields of clover and new-mown hay.