All our hopes, all our ambitious, all our loves, our joys, our sorrows,—all, all will be rolled away or floated away down the river, and the ripples will ripple on jest as happy; the Sunshine will kiss the hills jest as warmly, and lovin’ly; but other eyes will look on ’em, other hearts will throb and burn within ’em at the sight.
Kinder sad to think on, haint it?
Chapter XVIII.
THE SOCIAL SCIENCE MEETING.
One day Josiah and me went into a meetin’ where they wuz kinder fixin’ over the world, sort a repairin’ of it, as you may say. Some of the deepest, smartest speeches I ever hearn in my life, I hearn there.
You know it is a middlin’ deep subject. But they rose to it. They rose nobly to it. Some wuz for repairin’ it one way, and some another—some wanted to kinder tinker it up, and make it over like. Some wanted to tear it to pieces, and build it over new. But they all meant well by the world, and nobody could help respectin’ ’em.
I enjoyed them hours there with ’em, jest about as well as it is in my power to enjoy anything. They wuz all on ’em civilized Christian folks and philanthropists of different shades and degrees, all but one. There wuz one heathen there. A Hindoo right from Hindoostan, and I felt kinder sorry for him. A heathen sot right in the midst of them folks of refinement, and culture, who had spent their hull lives a tryin’ to fix over the world, and make it good.
This poor little heathen, with a white piller case, or sunthin’ wound round his head (I s’pose he hadn’t money to buy a hat), and his small black eyes lookin’ out kinder side ways from his dark hombly little face, rousted up my pity, and my sympathy. There had been quite a firm speech made against allowin’ foreigners on our shores. And this little heathen, in his broken speech, said, It all seemed so funny to him, when everybody wuz foreigners in this country, to think that them that got here first should say they owned it, and send everybody else back. And he said, It seemed funny to him, that the missionarys we sent over to his land to teach them the truth, told them all about this land of Liberty, where everybody wuz free, and everybody could earn a home for themselves, and urged ’em all to come over here, and then when they broke away from all that held ’em in their own land, and came thousands and thousands of milds, to get to this land of freedom and religion,then they wuz sent back agin, and wuzn’t allowed to land. It seemed so funny.
And so it did to me. And I said to myself, I wonder if they don’t lose all faith in the missionarys, and what they tell them. I wonder if they don’t have doubts about the other free country they tell ’em about. The other home they have urged ’em to prepare for, and go to. I wonder if they haint afraid, that when they have left their own country and sailed away for that home of Everlastin’ freedom, they will be sent back agin, and not allowed to land.
But it comferted me quite a good deal to meditate on’t, that that land didn’t have no laws aginst foreign emigration. That its ruler wuz one who held the rights of the lowest, and poorest, and most ignerent of His children, of jest as much account as he did the rights of a king. Thinkses I that poor little head with the piller case on it will be jest as much looked up to, as if it wuz white and had a crown on it. And I felt real glad to think it wuz so.