Let our young women who are in straitened circumstances, in circumstances that seem absolutely exclusive of all hope of retaining virtue and keeping life, read this book and its predecessor, and pluck up faith and hope. Let all our young ladies, daughters of loving parents, daughters who have no care for the morrow, daughters of delicious ease and happy opportunity, read this book, and then let their consciences ask them how they are to carry their idleness to be examined at the judgment sent of Christ, in contrast with this blind girl's industry, fidelity and perseverance.
CHARLES F. DEEMS.
CHURCH OF THE STRANGERS,
New York, 4th July, 1878.
CHAPTER I.
"Warriors and statesmen have their meed of praise,
And what they do, or suffer, men record;
While the long sacrifice of woman's days
Passes without a thought, without a word:
And many a holy struggle for the sake
Of duty, sternly, faithfully fulfil'd;
For which the anxious soul must watch and wait,
Goes by unheeded as the summer wind,
And leaves no memory, and no trace behind!
Yet, it may be, more lofty courage dwells
In one meek heart that braves an adverse fate,
Than his whose ardent soul indignant swells,
Warmed by the fight, or cheered through high debate.
The soldier dies surrounded; could he live
Alone to suffer, and alone to strive?"
So was rendered the sad soul-music of one of the legion,
"Who learned in sorrow
What they taught in song."
and the weird words have been echoed by the voice of many a woman all along, whose weary wanderings have burned the sacrificial fires; amid the ashes of whose dead hopes the embers have flickered and faded only to rekindle the lurid, lustrous light of added, and still added offerings. There, waiting and watching the deep tracery "upon the sands beside the sounding sea," find wave after wave wash away the mystic hand-writing.
The ebbing tide carries afar the ships freighted with aching, anguished hearts; when borne upon the swell of the flowing sea, come the swift sails of Argosies richly laden with hope, full with fruition.
Within the heart of all there lies deeply imbedded the "Black Drop" of which the Mahometan legend tells, and which the angel revealed to the Prophet of Allah. 'Tis in aching anguish this drop must be probed and purified, to be healed only through the endless eloquence of duty done.