"What is it?" said she, opening her wild, glittering eyes.
"It's something to make you feel better."
"I don't want to feel better! I want to die!" she said, throwing herself over. "What should I want to live for?"
What should she? The words struck father Dickson so much that he sat for a while in silence. He meditated in his mind how he could reach, with any words, that dying ear, or enter with her into that land of trance and mist, into whose cloudy circle the soul seemed already to have passed. Guided by a subtle instinct, he seated himself by the dying girl, and began singing, in a subdued plaintive air, the following well-known hymn:—
"Hark, my soul! it is the Lord,
'Tis thy Saviour, hear his word;
Jesus speaks—he speaks to thee!
Say, poor sinner, lov'st thou me?"
The melody is one often sung among the negroes; and one which, from its tenderness and pathos, is a favorite among them. As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate, so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter. The moon shone full on the face of the dying girl, only interrupted by flickering shadows of leaves; and, as father Dickson sung, he fancied he saw a slight, tremulous movement of the face, as if the soul, so worn and weary, were upborne on the tender pinions of the song. He went on singing:—
"Can a mother's tender care