“That light which has been given to me
I desire to pass undimmed to others!”
The voice which repeated this high desire, the purest the human heart can know, was Jessica’s.
It was a voice which thrilled and trembled just as it had done over six months before when, by the lakeside Council Fire, Morning-Glory had given her girlish pledge to tend, even as her fathers and fathers’ fathers had tended, the sacred heart-fire of humanity—kernel of its hearth fire, too—the love of man for man, the love of man for God.
That she had been tending it in lowly places where, otherwise, that flame would have been a feeble flicker, where in one case it would have been hidden under the heavy bushel of a deaf ear and silent tongue in a child’s head, was shown by the presence of four little girls whom she had made happy once a week for three months, thus meeting one of the requirements for gaining the highest rank among Camp Fire Girls.
This group of children, aged about eight or nine years, was known by the beautiful name of a Bluebird Nest, called after the azure harbinger-bird whose appearance in spring, as a great naturalist says, is the signal for sky and earth to meet, as their hues do in his plumage, in other words a call for them to cease their winter strife and prepare for summer.
And these little human Bluebirds, now in the early spring of life, were preparing for the summer of being Camp Fire Girls; that is three of them were; the fourth, the deaf-and-dumb Rebecca of the city playground, was so handicapped and retarded by her affliction that nobody could prophesy what her future would be; suffice it that, at present, she was happy!
There was a sparkle in those patient, purple eyes of hers which held no ray when the girls first saw her on the public playground, lacking a little partner in the folk-dance. Of all the lights which the new Torch Bearer, Jessica, whose Camp Fire name was Morning-Glory, might pass on undimmed to others from the happy glow within herself and from the lamp of those Ideals which, like a wise virgin of the parable, she kept trimmed and burning, none would be more heavenly than that torch first kindled in a dumb lamb’s heart.
“But, do you know, I don’t believe that little ’Becca is going to be dumb always,” remarked Mŭnkwŏn, Arline, arching the future with her rainbow symbol, when the ceremony of initiating one member of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire into the highest rank was over, when the girls were seated in a semicircle on the floor, before a blazing Council Fire. “You may remember,” addressing the crescent company, “how the playground teacher said that, once, when the children were all yelling ‘Swing! Swing!’ at the tops of their voices—and those foreign children can scream both in their own language and every other—Rebecca seemed to catch some sound or vibration and said ‘swing’ plainly, too!”
“Oh! even if she remains deaf, she can, no doubt, be taught to speak, later on, by means of the oral method or lip-reading,” suggested Gheezies, the Guardian of the Camp Fire.