Oh, what a magic is in that scene conjured up by the fairy power of imagination! The visions may fly at the first faint blush of the coming morn. The sleeper may awaken with a sigh and a tear; but he has been home again; he has kissed his children; oh, he has been happy, although ’twas but a dream. Soldier, may such dear visions ever haunt thy pillow!
May sleep—gentle sleep—
“Nature’s soft nurse,”
ever haunt the couch of innocence! If the persecuted and the unhappy had nothing but that oblivion from care to thank Heaven for, it should be sufficient to fill the heart with holy thoughts and deep thanksgiving.
What would our poor Ada have done, but for sleep? And she could sleep, although Jacob Gray could not. The weary months were reduced more than one-half, and Heaven sent visions of joy and gushing tenderness to uphold and comfort that young and beautiful girl in her solitude. The day might be gloomy, and the old lone house dispiriting and cheerless, but the fancy, when the body slept, took its airy flight, and, Heaven-directed, laid in stores of beauty and food for waking thoughts.
Ada had kept her word with Gray. She had never once passed the threshold of that lonely abode, and she had renewed her promise from time to time, although with many tears; but she would not throw away the life that God had given, so she lived on, illumined in her heart by the hope that the day would come when her dreams would become reality, and her present reality seem to her but as the fevered imaginings of a dream!
From some hidden place in her prison-house, she would sometimes look out for hours together upon the blue sky, and envy the wild birds as they winged their free and happy flight far, far away in the liquid depths of the blue arch that spanned the world. She would listen, too, to the song of the aspiring lark as it flew up—up towards heaven, until it became but a small speck in the sky. This was a delight to Ada; and to her imaginative mind nothing could be sweeter music than the slowly decreasing cadences of that wild, happy song of the lark as in its very recklessness of joy it leaves the earth so far behind.
Far away sometimes in the open fields she would see some one picking his or her way along the swampy ground, and she blessed the sight off any other human face than Gray’s.
Then in the old house there were insects—crawling things, which in the great world are despised and put to death because we cannot see their beauties, nor appreciate their pains; but Ada, with a simple and beautiful theology, taught her by her own heart, and culled from the few books she had read, feared not these creatures, for she looked upon them all with a kindly spirit, as being the creations of the same Great Being who had made the mountains, the wondrous ocean, and all the living, breathing things of earthy, sea and air.
So in course of time the very mice would come forth at the sound of her voice and eat from her hand, peering at her from their bright twinkling eyes, without fear.