In the brush

by Hamilton W. Pierson

A few days after this, as I was taking a lonely horseback-ride to an adjoining parish, I heard the negroes singing in a field that I could not see, lying behind a wood that skirted the road. I stopped my horse for a moment to listen to their music. I could hear no words, but at once distinguished "Ortonville." Soon after I inquired of my host how long these people had been singing this tune, and where they had learned it; and was told that the minister I had seen upon the Sabbath, while on a visit to his relatives in the State of Georgia the fall before, had heard it sung at the meeting of the Synod, and was so much pleased with it that he procured a copy, and in that manner it had been introduced to this place and the places adjacent. At one of those places I was told that they were so much pleased with it that they had sung it over and over one Sabbath-day during the entire intermission.

Time passed on, and in my invalid wanderings I was within the tropics, sailing in the track of Columbus, along the north shore of Hayti. Entering those waters, so often tinged with human blood, that divide this island from the famed Tortugas, as if in harmony with the dark memories that crowded upon the mind, black clouds began to darken the heavens, the thunders rolled, the lightnings gleamed with terrific fury, and amid the most sublime tumult of the elements we were carried along until our little craft dropped anchor in the bay of Port de Paix. The storm and darkness were such that I could not go ashore, and I was that night rocked to sleep on waters where many a pirate-ship, with bloody deck, had ridden securely at anchor, and prepared to set forth again on new missions of pillage and death. This harbor was the chief rendez-vous, the refuge from danger, and retreat from toil, of the buccaneers that for years infested these seas, and whose piratical plunderings for so long a time made their names a terror to all within their reach. However, not being particularly superstitious, I slept soundly for the night.

In the morning I left our little vessel and received—what is ever so grateful to a wanderer on a foreign shore, and especially to one who has any sympathy with the command, "Go teach all nations"—a welcome to the residence of a countryman, to a missionary's humble home. Ay, noble men and women are they, who, forgetful of themselves, and alone for the honor of the Master that they serve, leaving the comforts and amenities of a Christian civilization, toil on through life amid manifold discouragements, endeavoring to instruct and elevate the degraded, and, above all else, anxious to

"Allure to brighter worlds and lead the way."

And yet, like those whose own minds are so degraded and debauched that they can not conceive of purity and virtue in any character, there are those who are so utterly ignorant and unconscious of the lofty sentiments that animate these self-sacrificing missionaries, that they are ever finding, in base, unworthy, and ignoble objects, the grand motive of their life-work. Such may well ponder the life of unparalleled Christian heroism of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, of which the undoubted and sufficient motive was a constraining LOVE!

Evening darkened around the dwelling of the missionary, and a little group of natives assembled for religious worship. I sat in that little room and listened to the words of instruction, praise, and prayer, with indescribably strange emotions, for all was in a language that I did not understand. As the services proceeded, a hymn was read by the missionary with peculiar interest and emotion, and the dark group sang in the familiar strains of "Ortonville":

"Beni soit bien qui chaque jour
Nous comble de ses biens,
Et dont s'inconvenable amour
A romptu nos liens."

What a change—what a change! The haunts of bloody pirates giving place to the home of the missionary of the cross; the wild, agonized shrieks of their murdered victims succeeded by the sweet and peaceful notes of "Ortonville!" And so this tune has often been sung where sounds of direst woe and wretchedness had long been heard, and so it doubtless will be, and onward to the millennium.

As I once returned from a small church on the banks of the Savannah River, where it had been sung, the friend whose hospitality I was enjoying remarked:

"My brother-in-law, a missionary, told me he first heard that tune, and since had often sung it, on Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, and it sounded most sweetly there."