‘Perhaps you had better wait till morning,’ said Mrs. Scudder; ‘you are tired and excited.’
‘Oh, mother, I think I shall be more composed when I know all that is in it,’ said Mary, still stretching out her hand.
‘Well, my daughter, you are the best judge,’ said Mrs. Scudder; and she set down the candle on the table, and left Mary alone. It was a very thick letter, of many pages, dated in Canton, and ran as follows:
CHAPTER XXXVI.
‘My Dearest Mary,—I have lived through many wonderful scenes since I saw you last; my life has been so adventurous that I scarcely know myself when I think of it. But it is not of that I am going now to write; I have written all that to mother, and she will show it to you: but since I parted from you there has been another history going on within me, and that is what I wish to make you understand if I can.
‘It seems to me that I have been a changed man from that afternoon when I came to your window where we parted. I have never forgotten how you looked then, nor what you said; nothing in my life ever had such an effect on me. I thought that I loved you before; but I went away feeling that love was something so deep, and high, and sacred, that I was not worthy to name it to you; I cannot think of the man in the world that is worthy of what you said you felt for me. From that hour there was a new purpose in my soul—a purpose which has led me upward ever since.
‘I thought to myself in this way, “There is some secret source from whence this inner life springs;” and I knew that it was connected with the Bible which you gave me, and so I thought I would read it carefully and deliberately, to see what I could make of it. I began with the beginning; it impressed me with a sense of something quaint and strange—something rather fragmentary; and yet there were spots all along that went right to the heart of a man who has to deal with life and things as I did.
‘Now I must say that the Doctor’s preaching, as I told you, never impressed me much in any way. I could not make any connection between it and the men I had to manage, and the things I had to do in my daily life. But there were things in the Bible that struck me otherwise; there was one passage in particular, and that was where Jacob started off from all his friends, to go off and seek his fortune in a strange country, and lay down to sleep all alone in the field, with only a stone for his pillow. It seemed to me exactly the image of what every young man is like when he leaves his home, and goes out to shift for himself in this hard world. I tell you, Mary, that one man alone on the great ocean of life feels himself a very weak thing: we are held up by each other more than we know, till we go off by ourselves into this great experiment. Well, there he was, as lonesome as I upon the deck of my ship; and so lying with this stone under his head, he saw a ladder in his sleep between him and heaven, and angels going up and down. That was a sight which came to the very point of his necessities; he saw that there was a way between him and God, and that there were those above who did care for him, and who could come to him to help him.