“My feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!”
Was I, then, so near the fulfilment of the heavenly dream?
We sailed for the Holy City in September—my big boy and I. Doctor Terhune could not go, and we had always promised that our son should have a foreign trip when his university work was done. The opportunity was auspicious.
Each of us told as much of the story of the memorable seven months abroad as we were willing the public should read—I, in the letters published first in the Christian Herald, subsequently in book-form under the title, The Home of the Bible; Bert, in a smaller volume, Syria from the Saddle, a breezy chronicle of a young man’s impressions of what he saw and heard while in Syria. I considered it then, and I think it now, a remarkable book, coming, as it did, from the pen of a boy of twenty-one. He celebrated his majority in the desert-places between Damascus and Jerusalem.
Two or three incidents, eventful forever to us, may be mentioned briefly in this personal narrative.
I am not a believer in dreams. I do attach importance to “coincidences,” holding some that have fallen into my life in reverence the more sincere because I cannot explain them away.
One night in Paris, where we spent a fortnight on the way to Syria via Egypt, I had a long and distressing dream of carrying a poor ailing baby along dark streets and over fences and fields. My arms ached under the weight of the limp body; my heart and ears ached with the piteous wailing of the sufferer, for whom I could do nothing. I awoke in the morning, utterly worn out in nerve, and depressed unreasonably in spirit. That forenoon I wrote my daughter:
“It was an ugly, gruesome dream. Your aunt Myrtle would see in it an omen of evil. She says that a death in the family has always followed her dream of the sick baby she cannot put out of her arms. It is an old superstition. You may recollect that Charlotte Brontë alludes to it in Jane Eyre. I have so such dreads. Yet I find myself wishing that I had not had that ‘visitation.’ It has left a very unpleasant impression on my mind—a sort of bad taste in my mental mouth. I am thankful that it came to me, and not to Myrtle.”
My sister had been ill before we left home, but was convalescent when we sailed, and a letter from her husband awaited us in Paris, conveying the cheerful assurance of her confirmed improvement in health and strength, and bidding me have no further anxiety on her account.