Then shy Judith slipped away, and never told even Aunt Affy that she had apologized to the new minister.
That evening in the twilight, sitting on the piazza alone, she wrote on the fly-leaf of her small Bible, in pencil:—
Judith Grey Mackenzie; A Disciple.
And the date, May 15, 18—.
She thought she would like to tell somebody that she was a disciple. But if they should ask how it happened, she could not tell. It had happened as still as a leaf fluttering in the wind, as softly as the apple-blossoms came; nobody could tell about that. She thought the Holy Spirit must know how it happened.
VIII. THIS WAY, OR THAT WAY?
“My times are in Thy hand, and Thou
Wilt guide my footsteps at Thy will.”
It was six o’clock that May evening, and Joe was running away. He did not know he was running away. He had never been taught to read, and no one had ever told him a story, and his own experience of life was so limited, that he did not know that he was starting out in the world to find adventures, to find good or evil, to find a new life, and that new life, shaped more by what was inside of himself, than what was outside of himself. If the man who just passed him had asked him what he was doing, he would have said, had he not been overcome by one of his fits of shyness, that he was “gittin’ out.”
The air was damp, and sweet with the scent of blossoms. At his right ran a range of low hills, abrupt and green; at his left, as far as he could see, stretched the swamp, miles of meadow, over-flooded in the spring, waving with grass in the summer, and homely with unpainted one-story houses, and out-buildings in various stages of decay; it was a pasture land for the cattle of the farmers in the upland district, and Joe’s bare feet had trodden its miles morning and night ever since he had been old enough to drive the cows.