Not in vain, as we have seen, were her lonely vigils, sewing far toward midnight in the sleep-enwrapped tavern, that her children might be clothed, toiling before break of day, the pale candle guiding her hands to heroic labor that her loved ones might be fed. Much does Oliver owe her, and much is now repaid, on this last night in Kentucky. He baptized her; and as she came up out of the water, with his arm so tenderly passed about her, she looked at him through her wonderful, new-found happiness. "If all were as easy to obey as baptism," she murmured, "it would be easy enough!"
And so,—the boat to Cincinnati where W. T. Moore's father-in-law, he who is later to become Governor Bishop of Ohio,—entertains the bridal pair in his home, and other friends assemble for goodbys,—the goodbys at Macomb, Illinois. And then to New York to set forth for Australia, by way of England. On board at last—and under a sullen sky they stand on deck, watching their native land fade—fade—till nothing is to be seen but a world of angry waves.
CHAPTER VIII.
AN ENGLISH PRIMROSE.
The voyage, begun on a rough sea, was continued over angry waves. For seven days the ship was beaten by the winds. It was the first time Oliver and Mattie had been outside of Kentucky. Added to the distress of seasickness was the thought that, after this passage to England, another voyage of almost three months awaited them before they could set foot upon the strange land selected for their missionary labors. No wonder as the bride was borne farther and farther across the uneasy Atlantic, her thoughts went constantly back to Kentucky—"That far-off land," she writes, "my beautiful, sunny Southland."
Since the wedding-day, there have been a marvelous succession of strange scenes—the trip to New York, the hurried visits to points of interest in New York and Brooklyn, the mingling with the rush and roar of Broadway, and, stranger than all these, this helpless tossing in the cabin, as the ship throbs and lifts dizzily in air—lifts to sink down and down, as if never to ride the sea again.
"That Twenty-Sixth day of March!" she writes in pencil with shaking hand. "It dawned so bright and beautiful. In its soft morning twilight I knelt before an altar, and laid thereon not only the heart of a bride, but all that I had best known in childhood and in girlhood: Home with all its tender associations, friendship whose face shone as the face of an angel—the sweet brier that shed its fragrance beneath my window, the birds that sang for me, the dear old 'big spring' over whose cooling-ripples I have so often stooped to drink"—she remembers all these, as the ship bears her farther from that America she may never see again.